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CflPflilGHT DEPOSiT. 



STANDING BY 



STANDING BY 



WAR-TIME REFLECTIONS IN 
FRANCE AND FLANDERS 



BY 
ROBERT KEABLE 

AUTBOB OF "a CITT OF THK DAWN," >T0. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1919, 
By E. p. DUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 





^ 






I'll 



c\(^'^ 



Printed In the United States of America 

AUG -4 1919 

(0)CI.A529467 



CONTENTS 



CHAFTIIB 



PAGE 



I. On "Standing By" 1 

II. Amiens 13 

III. Cre^y 20 

rV. Village and Chateau 27 

V. Army Chaplains 34 

VI. Paris 44 

VII. Old Bill 55 

VIII. French Bells 66 

IX. The Heart of a Child 74 

X. Michael and Agnesi 85 

XI. Modern Ugliness 94 

XII. Versailles 105 

XIII. Street Girls 116 

XrV. The Hangar 127 

XV. Christmas in the B.E.F 135 

XVI. Concerts 145 

XVII. Flotsam of War 158 

XVIII. The Church in the Searchlight ... 168 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIX. Rome 184 

XX. Contrasts 195 

XXI. Kindergarten Religion — 

1. Philip 201 

2. At Evening Time 207 

3. The Romance of Missions . . . 214 
XXII. "Au Guidon" 221 

XXIII. Jumieges 232 

XXIV. TheWaacs 247 

XXV. Peace Terms 260 



STANDING BY 



STANDING BY: 

WAR-TIME REFLECTIONS IN FRANCE 
AND FLANDERS 



I 
ON *' STANDING BY'* 

THE Army cannot have taken much less 
than five million of us to whom soldier- 
ing has been practically a new experi- 
ence. Some, of course, had served in O.T.C.'s 
or Territorials or Volunteers, and for a year or 
two put in a fortnight annually under canvas. 
But we had not known the Army. We had 
never got past the thrill of the uniform, and that 
curious sense, either of responsibility in tak- 
ing, or of membership in giving, the salute. A 
good many of us had enjoyed the game im- 
mensely. "We had even hoped to play it under 
more strenuous conditions. We had been 
aware that it developed us. But we had no 
idea what it would be like when the routine had 
become part of our existence, when the machine 
had dominated our personalities, and when the 

1 



2 STANDING BY 

days had lengthened to months and the months 
to years. 

Moreover, of course, this is to set aside the 
fact that no one, even in the regular Army it- 
self, knew what this war would be like. It is 
one thing to belong to a regular army whether 
in peace or in war, and quite another to be a unit 
in a nation mobilised from top to bottom all but 
irrespective even of sex. Besides, no living 
Englishman had experienced a Western Euro- 
pean War unless as an isolated volunteer in 
1870, and a soldier's life in a foreign civilised 
country was as strange as combat with highly 
trained conscript armies in the field itself. All 
this is upon the surface, but it might be sup- 
posed that the ground of such an experience had 
been fairly well covered by now. Our authors 
have revealed to us the making of "Kitchener's 
Army" — it sounds quite far away now; every 
phase of life in the trenches, on the sea, and in 
the air; even the experiences of V.A.D.'s and 
chaplains, the latter everywhere. I might well 
have asked myself where I came in. In fact, 
however, this book has been written without the 
posing of such a question at all. 

Life is so varied that every man, since each 
of us has a different pair of spectacles on his 
nose, sees it differently from his neighbour; he 
sees more and he sees less, he sees this more 
sharply or that less clearly. The record of 
every point of view has its value^ I think, even 



ON "STANDING BY" S 

if it be so unassuming and commonplace a rec- 
ord as that given here. Not that this particular 
life, in this age and on this Front, could be com- 
monplace altogether, but it is true that there 
are fewer thrilling chapters in my little record 
than in most. My lesson, if any, has been to 
learn; my task, if I have one, to seek to indi- 
cate the value of one of the simplest experiences 
in the Army; but the early simple lessons are 
often the most valuable. 

That the Army is a great school everybody 
knows, but that its first and last lesson is pa- 
tience is not quite so apparent. Discipline, 
brotherhood, fortitude, resource, all these it 
plainly teaches, but I should put first patience. 
For every one of us spends a great part of his 
time in ** standing by," and most of us find this 
the hardest thing of all. Possibly a parson 
finds it as hard as anyone, and certainly he has 
most of it to do. He finds it hard, because a 
parson worth his salt never stands by in his par- 
ish. His duty is never done. His responsibil- 
ity can never be shared or passed on to an- 
other. In a native mission this is emphasised 
a hundred-fold, for the mission priest is made 
responsible, whether he will or no, not merely 
for marriages but for matches, not merely for 
Sundays but for sundries. In my parish I am 
a bit of farmer, doctor, lawgiver, schoolmaster 
and choir trainer, architect and all but magis- 
trate, as well as priest. Even when other peo- 



4 STANDING BY 

pie undertake these duties, I cannot stand by 
and watch them do it. 

Now the Army is a wonderful institution, and 
a conscript army of the Nation possibly the 
most wonderful that the world has ever seen. 
The sooner the world sees the last of it, too, the 
better, though that is another story. It is 
chiefly an employer of labour on the most orig- 
inal terms. It does not engage men for a job or 
a series of jobs, but it fits all men into all jobs 
as it pleases. Internally it is a business con- 
cern in which there is no competition, and in 
which labour has no voice. It is not a business 
out to achieve, like most businesses, an unlim- 
ited end, but one with a definite programme and 
no more. It does not particularly encourage 
super-excellence; it never asks for voluntary 
overtime ; but it sets a standard and gives a job, 
and one has to toe the line to that. "When it is 
not your time for a particular job, you stand 
by, and the business is indifferent to the length 
of your standing by so long as you are there and 
up to scratch when needed. In no other insti- 
tution is it so true that every dog has his day, 
for even Tommy has his day with an officer when 
as sentry he is approached without a pass. But 
on other days the dog's chief job is to efface 
himself. Any infringement of this rule leads 
straight to that soul-killing desert known as 
Red Tape, and probably to that bottomless 



ON "STANDING BY'» 5 

precipice of a ** strafe" in which one may dis- 
appear from sight even for ever. 

Everybody, then, learns to stand by. Men 
stand by in oflSces drawing lines on blotting- 
paper (unless they are in favoured offices and 
can read the Bystander) until the idler's soul 
is sick within him. They stand by in trenches 
twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, and un- 
questionably the twenty-fourth does not make 
up for the twenty-three. They stand by for 
what soon totals into days on docks and in hang- 
ars. An officer waits ten hours for opportu- 
nities he fulfils in one ; the men wait for the next 
bale or the next ship quite as long as they spend 
in handling them. Even Waacs stand by in 
cars waiting for colonels quite as long a time 
as they spend in driving them. And as for 
padres, well, it is commonly supposed that they 
stand by six days out of seven, and the greater 
part of the seventh when it comes. Because 
they seek to do otherwise, they probably know 
more about red tape and strafing than most peo- 
ple. 

Possibly more standing by has fallen to my 
lot (and to the lot of my immediate brethren) 
even than to most padres, because, paradox- 
ically, less standing by has fallen to my flock. 
Of necessity it is a more or less general prin- 
ciple with us that if the other men are standing 
by, you are not, and if you are not, they are. 
In one sense, natives in the Army give fewer 



6 STANDING BY 

opportunities for a padre's work than most 
units, especially natives who work as ours 
worked. You cannot play games and stand 
around smoking with them quite as much as 
with Tommies. They are rather exclusive even 
in their recreations. We have, indeed, more 
services per unit, but again we have fewer units 
per man than most padres, and it cannot be pre- 
tended that it takes as long to prepare for a na- 
tive sermon as for a white one. We could not, 
in particular, share the life of the boys as the 
chaplain may hope to do that of his in the 
trenches. But I have comforted myself with 
the reflection that the more standing by I had 
to do, the more opportunity I had of learning 
the great lesson, and the more chance of seeing 
the unfolding of this wonderful age. 

The lesson is one's own relative unimpor- 
tance, and yet of one 's own unshared responsi- 
bilities in the making of the future. The Army 
teaches that life is a great machine in which 
each of us matters remarkably little, and yet 
that in so far as we do matter we each have a 
unique place. ''Do your own job and don't 
worry about the next man's," it says. *'See 
that you come up to line when you're wanted, 
and let other people get on with their business 
when you're not." That is very well worth 
thinking over. It may be that it will be the 
rule in the age that is coming, and that each 
citizen will contribute his portion to the great 



ON "STANDING BY" 7 

whole, and then turn aside to do more or less 
as he pleases until his turn comes again. Such 
a principle does not breed irresponsible men, 
for in the Army one is absolutely responsible 
when one is carrying on, but it does breed mod- 
erately contented men — or at least it should do 
— ^because one is absolutely not responsible if 
one is standing by. The contrast with civilian 
life is amazing. At first one carries over the 
habit of mind that one acquired in ordinary life. 
Ordered, for example, to travel by train, one 
worries at first over the ticket, the possibility 
of accommodation, and so on; but all that is 
superfluous. You have to do no more than re- 
port at the hour and place named on your writ- 
ten orders — and without written orders you do 
nothing of this sort in the Army. You turn up 
at the given time; if the E.T.O. is busy you 
stand by. If he should be busy until the train 
goes, it would not make the least difference to 
you, for you are not responsible, and you will 
be accommodated and fed as well here as you 
would have been there. But there is no need 
to worry, the train will not go until the R.T.O. 
is ready; and if he keeps it waiting that is his 
job. And so, finally, you acquire the magnifi- 
cent indifference of Tommy. He is fully 
trained to carry on in any stunt that may be re- 
quired of him ; otherwise he contentedly stands 
by. I have often watched men come down to 
the leave boat. They arrive at the quay and 



8 STANDING BY 

things are not quite ready, so they are ordered 
to stand by. They do so. They will sit down 
in the road if they cannot get to the curb or the 
wall, and light a pipe, and speedily become ap- 
parently indifferent to time or place. It takes 
training. But it is the great lesson of the 
Army. 

Now when you are standing by you need do 
nothing. You are concerned in nothing. So 
long as you do not actually break some regula- 
tion you can do as you please, observe what you 
like (only in France you must not use a camera, 
which has been one of the griefs of my life), 
and record what you like (provided you pay at- 
tention to the censor). And all this is incred- 
ibly interesting. To have seen the resistless 
whirl of the maelstrom dragging every element 
of national life into the vortex; to have stood 
above the flood and watched the new rosy dawn 
on the waters ; to have caught through the mists 
some glimpse of the Promised Land; and per- 
haps more, to have stumbled along with the pil- 
grims on the march; could any ask more than 
this? Early on in the War, when I read Mr. 
Philip Gibbs' book The Soul of the War, my- 
self then six thousand miles from the theatre 
he described, I felt the fascination. I admit 
that it appealed so to my imagination that I 
hardly knew rest until at length I too drew near 
to that throbbing soul. I did not know then 
how difificult it would be to come. I had not 



ON "STANDING BY" 9 

realised, out there, that this was no traditional 
war, but the nation in arms, and that each had 
to stand by his old job until there arose the need 
for carrying on with a new one. But at last 
that need arose and I could come; and stand- 
ing by or carrying on since, I too have seen the 
travail of this monstrous overwhelming birth. 
I wonder now if I may confess to have writ- 
ten this book without thinking much about the 
writing? Some people, I suppose, have to find 
a medium for expression, and I think I am 
among them. I simply could not stand by and 
not try to record. And I have delighted in it, 
sometimes wickedly, sometimes with more un- 
selfish happiness. Wickedly, because there is 
an enormous joy in hugging the thought, when 
one is being strafed, or forgotten, or ragged, 
that down on paper some of it shall go and 
maybe be read. Happily, for I have seen 
things, as we all have seen, that I should like 
to do my little toward making better known, 
and yet again at times have felt so strongly 
that to have been wholly impotent would have 
been intolerable. And then there is that other 
secret thing, that joy of creation in literature as 
in art, which a man feels as never before when 
all his emotions are stirred. To have lived 
these days in France, and to have watched the 
agony and heroism of conflict ; to have stood by 
while civilisation died, and to have seen the 
hope of its rising again; and to have done all 



10 STANDING BY 

this without being able, if only for one's own 
satisfaction, in some measure to attempt to im- 
prison the spirit of the thing, as the score of the 
musician imprisons the sob and passion of his 
music — this would have been hard indeed. 

There can be no doubt, if one feels so, that it 
is worth while to write, for it is worth while to 
one's own self. Mr. Arthur Benson, in one of 
his recent books, discusses the question as to 
whether a man would write if he were sure no 
one would read ; and although the answer is pos- 
sibly bound to be in the negative, I would coun- 
ter by saying that a man is never sure that no 
one will read. Some of us, I think, would have 
to write, though we used a cypher and buried 
the volumes in a library, having used infinite 
pains and some bad language, like the immor- 
tal Mr. Pepys. For me, I came unduly under 
his influence early in life. I am inclined to 
think that Mr. Benson, for all he says, has come 
later, but come too. For oneself, it is worth 
while to write. 

But the standpoint of other people's judg- 
ment is another matter for the poor devil of an 
unknown author. There is, of course, a meas- 
ure of consolation if he finds a publisher ; and if 
he has been in the Army, he should have learned, 
having finished his part of the job, to stand by 
contentedly thereafter, unless, indeed, he is at- 
tempting to live by words alone. But I raise 
the question because of the saying of a friend, 



ON "STANDING BY" 11' 

which entered in at my ears and has sunk down 
into my heart. He said that we had had a 
plethora of war books, but that there was always 
room for another, provided that the writer had 
a psychological point of view of his own. In 
other words, we have had all but enough of per- 
sonal narrative, unless there be a magic of imag- 
ination in it. Naturally, by imagination he did 
not mean fiction. He would surely have 
thought we had had enough of that, even al- 
though newspapers in their turn (after men 
and shells, and aeroplanes, and guns, and sov- 
ereigns, and tanks, and war bonds, and food 
tickets, and prohibition and the rest in theirs) 
are necessary to win the War. 

I have wondered a little, then, if this so great 
thing might be true of me ; and it was the sud- 
den thought that my title had not perhaps come 
wholly by chance, but even hid a mystic mean- 
ing, that gives me hope. For having chosen it, 
and having come near to the end of Lent, I 
struck on a verse that naturally attracted my 
notice as never before. "There were standing 
by the Cross of Jesus ..." I read, and the 
words gripped me. If a man had had the sense 
of standing by that cross all these days as he 
stood by in the Army, and if, however imper- 
fectly and unseemingly at times, he had got 
something of that into his point of view, it 
might be well worth while to other people for 
him to write. And I have had that sense. Mr. 



12 STANDING BY 

Shearley Cripps has a story of an artist whom 
he took on trek, and who painted for him after- 
wards the picture of the road as he had seen it, 
and lo ! it took the form of a white figure on a 
cross. I cannot paint, but none otherwise 
would I depict the roads of France. And since 
our civiHsation has been so much the product 
of Christianity, whether true or abused, as that 
civilisation reels and dies it is Jesus who is 
stabbed. Yet even in its dying does it rise 
again, as even in their dying unnumbered boys 
have entered into life. And even more, what 
are we Christians (who have a unity which can- 
not be slain) but the Body of the Lord! and if 
Mary saw flesh immaculate of her, spat upon, 
torn, defiled, so does He see who stands where 
she stood that day. As I think of my pages, I 
am unutterably moved by this. Heroes and 
harlots are here, and they are not unlike. There 
is even pitifulness in the one, even nobility in 
the other. ... I cannot write all that I would 
say. But standing by the cross I am moved to 
feel with tears at times, and yet again at others 
to thunderous acclaim. 



Thorns bloom like roses on His brow, 
King's purple seems this disarray; 

From these scarred feet more blanched than snow 
Our lips have kissed the blood away. 

No soft Greek God in proud repose, 
No Sultan for his turbanned pride. 

No Army brave with banners shows 
So lovely as this Crucified. 



n 

AMIENS 

IT was in peace-time and before I had begun 
to wander that I first saw the great cathe- 
dral. I remember the day and the hot sun, 
and how I knew the proper things I ought to 
admire, and how I admired them — ^high nave, 
carven porch, oaken stall, and the rest. And I 
remember, too, how we criticised the paper 
flowers and crooked candles, and votive hearts, 
and then looked out the train to the next sight. 
Things seem to have changed so much since 
then. Of course the War is not responsible for 
all, but still the War-changes seem to empha- 
sise the rest. 

The car, then, put me down in the moonlight, 
tired and dusty from the hours of motoring and 
the fatigue of the last week, but still more dazed 
and weary in mind with what I had seen. A 
*'Push" had been on, and I, a base chaplain, 
had stolen a chance to run up to the Line and 
lend a hand at an Advanced Dressing Station 
for a day or two. I had been useful, and had 
been very glad of that, but principally I con- 
fess that I had gone only to see. I never shall 

13 



14 STANDING BY 

go again only to see. Nor, honestly, is it fear 
that makes me write that, for I would go at once 
if it were my duty, or even if I had a chance to 
help; but it is unthinkable that a man should 
go twice primarily out of curiosity. We had 
arrived soon after the first crossing of the para- 
pet, and the wounded had even then begun to 
come in. The car had left the main road a little 
south of the famous ruined town, and had jolted 
over by-roads to a couple of tents, camouflaged, 
in the corner of a field. The air thundered with 
guns all day, and the wind blew scents of war 
across us, though the sun smiled. Shells burst 
again and again fairly near, and once shrapnel 
came through a tent. But personally I hardly 
noticed these things, for all my reading had 
given me no more idea of the reality than I 
know my writing will do for others. As many 
have described, cars brought up the wounded, 
put them on the grass, carried them away after 
they had been through the tents. All I had to 
do was to give water ; light cigarettes ; if I could, 
pray. And we worked continuously, unrest- 
ingly, almost blindly to me at least, all day. 
But my imagination had failed to warn me ade- 
quately. I had not realised that men could so 
suffer and live. 

There was a Kentish boy, whose stomach had 
been torn away, and who yet lived. The sick- 
ening horror of it numbs. There are no words. 
And yet I do not feel any of the things people 



AMIENS 15 

seem to have felt. On the contrary, I ceased 
that day merely to hate the Germans or to rave 
against war. I did not know why just then, 
but I was glad, infinitely glad, to get back to 
Amiens. 

They thought I would go to my hotel, but I 
did not; I went to the cathedral square. The 
clean moonlight silvered, and shaded too, the 
delicate tracery and the fine thin spire, and I 
stood and drank it in. And then I went up be- 
tween the sand-bags that hid almost all the de- 
tail of the glory of the porch, sat down against 
the closed door, and hid my face in my hands. 
I believe that so, that night, I saw more of the 
cathedral than I saw when it had been to me a 
tourist's ''sight." 

All around the carven figures of the porch 
were chipped and battered, but not by the Hun. 
No bomb had struck there then, but Time had 
defaced them just the same. And what does 
one mean by Time? A hundred tiny wars, 
riots, foolishness, storms, even man's uncon- 
trolled religious zeal, have wounded Amiens 
without the Hun. Given long enough, and it 
will be as if his worst and strongest shell 
dropped upon it now. In my shut eyes I could 
see the tortured face of that poor lad and the 
time-worn cathedral too, and knew that both 
are one. It is War, and Time is War, and life 
is War, and the story of Earth is the tale of 
Pain, 



16 STANDING BY 

I even turned to look up at the grim but- 
tresses of sand-bags, all tarred and timbered 
and roped, and even, like a silly child, to smile 
and touch them. Good God, but the whole 
world is one crying parable to the souls of men ! 
How we sand-bag everything, and all so care- 
fully. Convention and decency, fair words and 
subtle logic, comfort and pleasure — we build up 
the defences, bag by bag, and stave off the in- 
evitable by moments so short as to be negligi- 
ble. Why, Amiens will be dust yet, and men 
forget that the sand-bags were ever there ! Oh, 
but let them sand-bag; it is human and good. 
But give us leave, now and again, to see the 
nobler and better way. It is all right to sand- 
bag, if you know the other. If you do not, there 
is awful tragedy ahead. Thinking on it, I won- 
dered, with a mist in my eyes, if that young 
Kentish lad knew it, when Agony struck at him 
in a moment from the blue, and lifted his naked 
soul in her grim hands to look into the eyes of 
God. 

It was in the morning, and within the cathe- 
dral, that I was shown a picture of the better 
way. I awoke too late for Mass, but I went 
straight to the church when I was ready. In- 
side the doors, the beauty and peace of such a 
place find infinite emphasis to-day. Never 
surely have such visitors wandered curiously 
about among these memorials of men and God ; 
but it makes no difference to Amiens. Bearded 



AMIENS IT 

Sikhs ; young men from the lands we call new, 
because, forsooth, we humans have only just 
begun to build upon them ; the girls of this new 
age, in their trim uniforms; — all were there. 
One wonders will they learn the lesson? A 
dozen of old and feeble folk before the chapel 
of the robed Christ, dit Saint-Saveur, seem to 
have learnt it, but will these? Perhaps. War 
teaches it ; if not the German War, the War of 
Time. 

But that has nothing to do with the better 
way of dealing with pain. I think now, that 
my heart was groping for it, and that God was 
preparing the answ^er, as I roamed unsatisfac- 
torily about the place. Three W.A.A.C. girls 
inspecting, solemnly, the fragment of St. John 
the Baptist's bone, brought my perambulations 
to a close, for between a sense of humour and a 
sense of the desolation of English religion, I 
had to go away and sit down. So I waded 
through the chairs to a centre spot in the nave, 
and knelt, and thought myself alone. 

So, presently, my eyes caught sight of two 
figures a dozen yards away to the right — a little 
before me, but not so much that I could not see 
their faces. They were sitting perfectly still, 
hand in hand, and one could read their story 
plainly enough. She was a young woman of the 
poorer class, but well dressed, as a French- 
woman should be; and he was a soldier in the 
uniform of the French line, and what was more, 



18 STANDING BY 

his whole kit was there, significantly, too. I 
have no doubt whatever that they had slipped 
into the cathedral on their way to the station. 

As I watched, she said something, and kneeled 
forward on the prie-Dieu before her. He stood 
np, as the French soldier does. Then she be- 
gan to pray for him to hear, and I conld catch 
a murmur. His eyes were fixed on the High 
Altar and never wavered from first to last, but 
she hid hers in her hands, after a little. Also 
her voice rose with the passion of her prayer, 
and soon one knew that she was weeping. At 
last she was praying loudly enough for me to 
catch the words, in French, of course, but I 
could understand the well-known prayer, and 
marvel at the simplicity of her so slight change 
in it. 

"Soul of Christ, sanctify him; 
Body of Christ, save him ..." 

80 she went on until: 

"Within Thy wounds hide Mm," 

she cried, and could say no more for sobs. 

And while I saw dimly, and waited for I knew 
not what, the man's voice broke calmly and 
steadily in, without even a hint of passion or of 
fear : 

"In the hour of my death, call me, 
And bid me come to Thee, 
That with Thy Saints I may praise Thee, 
For ever and ever, Amen." 



AMIENS 19 

And then, like the victor that he was, there, in 
God's House, and all unashamed before His 
High Majesty, he lifted the woman to her feet, 
and turned her face to his, and kissed her long 
upon the lips. 

Oh, my God, how fine a thing can human na- 
ture be ! It was no disgrace for You to share 
it. It has that in it which can look out across 
the worst that earth can do, and gather up its 
dearest into its arms, and go forward to You. 



Ill 

CRECY 

IT has been just such a day as I love. In 
the first place — rude as they will think it, 
if they ever read these lines! — my com- 
panions failed me: one because he had an in- 
different knee, the other, I shrewdly suspect, 
because he thought forty miles a bit too far to 
ride. Anyway, they failed, and so I, alone with 
my thoughts, pushed the bicycle out on to the 
road in the sun and the breeze, and set out. 
Small clouds scudded across a blue sky; the 
wind sang in trees just putting out autumn 
tints ; and the road lay, first, through those rich 
water-meadows which once were the swamps 
of the Somme that daunted Edward until he 
found a guide in the little village of Mons. It 
was extraordinarily peaceful. The cattle stood 
knee-deep in thick green grass, ' * too fat to want 
to eat," as our amazed boys from Basutoland 
put it when first they saw such beasts in Eng- 
land, and the wild flowers nodded in the fields 
and hedgerows to a song of peace. The little 
villages lay asleep in the sun. One ran by those 
seemingly dilapidated farms with a dung-heap 

20 



CRECY 21 

in the front courtyard, that one sees in France, 
yet each a picture with its background of trees 
and its lush fringe of grass; or passed little 
inns that seem to wait still for Napoleon's 
troopers or the dragoons of Louis. And then 
we crossed the straight, poplar-lined canal of 
the Somme, and the shallow, less-drilled river 
— what the canal has left of it. So, for a mile 
or two, by the high road ; then sharp up a coun- 
try lane which twisted and wound until it fil- 
tered out in a series of grassy fields, in one of 
which a maimed soldier and his wife directed a 
plough, and their children picnicked under the 
elms. 

That, then, is one side of the picture. And 
the other? Well, each house in each village had 
its billeting board: "Men, Officers, Horses," 
and a blank after each to be filled up as re- 
quired. The last numbers were still chalked 
on them, but most of the villages were empty 
of troops in any numbers. Where, then, one 
wondered, were the three officers and forty-two 
men that had slept in that farm a few weeks 
ago ? Gone to the line, I suppose, gone to swell 
the weekly thousands that win our battles with 
a '* comparatively small" casualty list; gone to 
be maimed, or wrecked past thought, or blown 
in one fell blast from the world of recognis- 
able objects, for the sake of — Liberty, Justice, 
Honour. I write them down in big letters! 
They look well, and even if we do not know 



22 STANDING BY 

their meaning, at least they stand for a grop- 
ing towards the ideal. And one must die ; God 
in heaven, what is the sorrow of dying for that? 
There would be none, I think, if one were sure 
that what one did really made for the ideal. 
But do they know, these men who die, and does 
what they do make for that ideal! 

So thinking, one looked curiously at the traf- 
fic on the roads. There was a company of Chi- 
nese at one place, marching to work: gay fel- 
lows, shirts open, hats off, smiling and laughing, 
half a dozen rather gloomy ^'P.B." men shep- 
herding them. They, at any rate, have come 
for a franc a day, and many of them because, 
at home, in China, there is not a startling 
amount of liberty or justice. I do not suggest 
for a moment ''Chinese Slavery"; I suppose 
that there is an arrangement with the democ- 
racy of China to take such part in the War. 
Each individual Chinee on the road to-day came 
because he wanted the adventure, or to clear 
out of his local city, or to get his franc a day. 
Once here, we compound ours to some extent; 
the French do not. One meets them strolling 
round the little towns, in the cafes, walking with 
the girls in the street. Poor France! But I 
am a philosopher here. I believe blood-mixing 
to be inevitable and good in the long end, how- 
ever nasty the process and immediate results 
often are. Perhaps as well, then, that it mix 
now as next century ; as well for a franc a day 



CRECY as 

— ^no, I mean for Liberty, Justice, and Hon- 
our, of course — as for hatred, when the East 
fights the West in the cycle of things. 

But that traffic, how incredible it is! A 
detachment of Belgians; English A.S.C. wag- 
gons; some strollers from an Australian 
camp; Indian troopers — fine, bearded fellows; 
a French regiment ; a party from an Egyptian 
labour corps ; cars full of officers, dashing by in 
a flurry of dust, who must, of course, be on duty ; 
an ox-waggon, pressed again into the services 
of sane living since War demands the rest ; and 
I, a missionary from Basutoland, who stand 
for the thousands of ''kaffirs" back there on the 
roads nearer Camp; — all these passed that 
morning in the way. Not that the traffic was 
limited to the road, however, for aeroplanes 
buzzed overhead. Indeed, I kept a count, and 
forasmuch as I was mainly on by-roads, six- 
teen aeroplanes went by overhead at some time 
or another for the fifteen cars on the level. 

One hardly takes in all that that traffic means. 
It means the smashing down of ancient barriers, 
and the passing of an age. The War is not re- 
sponsible, indeed ; it has merely speeded things 
up. But my mind goes out to Basutoland — to 
those silent mountains, and sunlit valleys, and 
simple villages that I love. Liberty, Justice, 
Honour — curious! we had them there. We 
none of us had votes; our chiefs were heredi- 
tary aristocrats ; our magistrates nominees of a 



24! STANDING BY 

distant alien government ; our standard of liv- 
ing was primitive. But we lived. "We la- 
boured and we loved; we were glad of the 
warmth of the gay sun or the clean fire; even 
we whites, who talked of the great world, we 
really cared more about our gardens. But 
after this, what comes? Ah! well, we shall 
come into the Union and have votes; I expect 
we shall develop mines and railways, and have 
hotels — hotels, certainly, for we are an ideal 
health resort ; and the air will put us within two 
or three days' reach of London, and turn our 
mountains into molehills. And we shall grow 
daily more civilised, till white has to reckon 
with black as rival, which is the thing for which 
my critics tell me that I work. So I ought to 
be glad when I see the promise of the new age 
on the roads in France. 

Curiously enough, I grew sadder instead, as 
the miles slipped by; but I became resigned, at 
least in time. It came about in this way. I 
found my way out of those green uplands into 
the forest that is still a forest of green glades 
and mighty trees and silences. And from it I 
ran down to the village of Cregy, where a de- 
tachment of cavalry watered their horses in the 
stream that watered the Black Prince's men-at- 
arms when he commanded the right of his 
father's army all but six centuries ago. Mr. 
Hilaire Belloc assured me that the village, too, 
was all but the same as then, and he pointed 



CRECY 25 

out, plainly enough in a few minutes, the lie of 
the land. I glanced from the map in his book 
to the landscape spread before me, and found 
it exactly as he says. There are the woods that 
sheltered such of the English waggons as had 
escaped the passage of the Somme ; there in all 
probability stood the windmill of fame; and 
there sloped the fields on which the Genoese 
cross-bowmen had been slain by the long-bows 
of England. And it is an old legend that can- 
non first barked at Cregy — a lie as like as not, 
although Madame of the Canon d'Or in the vil- 
lage where I lunched, would have been offended. 
But be that as it may, it was a battle that 
marked the passing of an age. Chivalry that 
day went down before peasantry. Feudalism 
watched its weapons overmatched by those of 
Democracy. The slain lay in heaps when the 
sun died down, that same day, 1346, because a 
stage was being reached towards the ideal of 
Liberty. Poor old feudal lords — free in their 
castles, administrators of justice, upholders of 
honour (well, that is what they would have 
said) — how they would have resented it if they 
had known ! But it was inevitable, and as bad 
a smash as that of a German aeroplane which, 
by a strange chance, lay on the very field, 
guarded by a French detachment. I looked at 
the one and I thought of the other, and at first 
I laughed. And then I grew silent. I thought 
of the lives tossed away, from Cregy 1346 to 



26 STANDING BY 

Ypres 1915, each one potent for love and labour 
and contentment, but tossed away — for what! 

Liberty, Just No, I will not write them 

again. It is a sad old world. Wherefore this 
slow birth in pain ? 

But still the day was not done. The home- 
ward road took me to St. Riguer, where is that 
superb mother-church, wrought in a wonder of 
carved stone, serene and quiet still. Yet it was 
not the church that mattered. In its chapel 
rested the Blessed Sacrament. A peace to con- 
troversy! — let us say that it was but a symbol 
of God, the Unchanging, the Perfect, the Ever- 
loving, the Goal which has neither length nor 
breadth nor height, but is yet fulness of living 
and of energy and of humanity. What, then, 
does anything else matter? It is weary, I 
know, that we must strive for the ideal of lib- 
erty and justice in every changing century, so 
painfully, and God Himself alone knows what 
will end it; but in each century souls can leap 
straight to the Heart of God and find the ideal 
there. And in the silence, before the Sacra- 
ment, there is a psan of triumphant unthink- 
able music which my ears just fail to hear. But 
one day. . . . 



IV 

VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 

THE road rises slowly all the three miles 
from the sea, and at last takes a 
sharper pitch to a crown of high 
woods. At the top of it stands the village cruci- 
fix, in the lands of Monsieur, and thence the 
road skirts his estate until you come to the iron 
gates of the entrance to the drive. The cha- 
teau itself stands back only a little from the 
road, as if it declined to withdraw itself from 
the village and the village life, but looks out 
across open lands to the wood and the sea be- 
yond. For still a few hundred yards you have 
the chateau wall on your left, and then at the 
comer is a small side door and a little street 
and the old quaint humble church that is little 
more than a much-patched barn in appearance. 
From this point the main road runs sharply 
downhill, and the tiny hamlet clusters on either 
side, with its school and its cafe and its shop 
and its mairie and its dozen of houses. Below 
lie the cider-apple orchards and the water- 
meadows, with lanes between that are bordered 
with high elms and poplars, and very fragrant 

27 



28 STANDING BY 

all the year. The place has an air of quiet self- 
contained importance that is characteristic of 
French villages. It is not a jumping-off place 
for a town ; folk are bom and live out their days 
and die here, still, as in the old days that come 
no more. 

It is typical of the best in France, then, this 
village. Thirty and two of its sons were of an 
age for war in 1914, and twenty-five of them 
will never come back again. Seven were em- 
ployed at the chateau, and they all went, and 
now the weeds grow in the drive, for the fields 
take all the labour of the women, and the drive 
will grow green for ever so far as those seven 
are concerned. It is overwhelming, this deso- 
lation. There is not a woman in the village but 
has lost father or son or husband or lover. And 
yet one hardly realises it. There are boys and 
old men still, and children at the school, and 
even the women are cheery at the plough or in 
the street. Only on Sunday one remembers as 
one sits in the church and sees that all wear, 
not merely black, but the black of mourning. 
Perhaps it is imagination, but the villagers seem 
subdued as nowhere else in the church, as they 
well may be, for surely, though the loved dust 
strews the fields from Flanders to Alsace, 
nevertheless they are here in the presence of 
their dead. 

The chateau and its family are a chapter of 
French history and a commentary on French 



VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 29 

life. Part of the fair building has graced the 
hill for five hundred years, but the main front 
was built under Louis xv. That wing was added 
under Louis xvii., and this begun after the Hun- 
dred Days. Within, the furniture dates almost 
entirely from the days of Louis xvi., and the 
drawing-room is one of the most wonderful 
rooms I know. Think of it : the wall-paper has 
been on those walls, unchanged and still un- 
dimmed, for one hundred and fifty years! It 
seems almost incredible, but it is a fact. Pos- 
sibly there are few rooms like it even in France, 
but there it is, a testimony to the old builders 
whose building knew no damp, and to a careful 
art which we have lost in our modern rushing 
days. In that old room, how much tragedy and 
joy there has been. There Monsieur and 
Madame, quiet and dressed as for guests, were 
arrested and haled to Paris in the Terror. 
Madame slipped the key into the hand of an 
under-housemaid in her teens, and the child 
locked up the place when the guard and the pris- 
oners had gone. Perhaps the village was too 
far from the centre to care much for politics, or 
again perhaps then, as now, this part of France 
cared still for the faith of the Church and the 
royal name ; at any rate, the years went by and 
none came to destroy. The girl grew to a 
woman, and married and had her children, and 
still she kept the key, and now and again slipped 
up to see that no harm came to the chateau of 



30 STANDING BY 

poor Madame. And the wheel spun round at 
last, and Madame in her age — alone — came 
back, and that by a miracle. At the door 
stood the under-housemaid with the key, and 
Madame came back to her own. And I think 
she must have sought that old drawing-room, 
and shut the door on all, and wept. 

They turned the hammered iron jBre-backs in 
those days that the fleur-de-lys might be hid- 
den against the wall, and they have turned them 
back again now, so that you can see them again. 
But that was the other day, and France had 
much to go through before then. In the vary- 
ing fortune of that early century, the chateau 
was often empty, though never again for so 
long; but as the years grew on, the bitter anti- 
clerical feeling seized the village and turned it 
yet once more against the Monsieur and the 
Madame of our days. The family of the under- 
housemaid was especially bitter, and at length, 
by the time relations were opened again be- 
tween chateau and village, the very remem- 
brance of the act of this particular family had 
disappeared. But last year a strange and 
touching incident revived it. The Cure was 
called in to the death-bed of a woman whose hus- 
band and sons were so bitter republicans that 
Madame from the chateau could not come to 
help, as is her kindly, old-fashioned, motherly 
way. The poor woman knew she could not hope 
for that, but she called the Cure, and her bus- 



VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 31 

band could not deny her him. And to the Cure 
she whispered, "Father, when I am dead, but 
not before, go to Madame and beg of her to have 
Masses said for my soul, for my husband and 
my sons will do nothing." "Will Madame do 
so, then?" asked the Cure. "Yes," said the 
dying woman, "for tell her that it was my 
grandmother who saved the chateau at the 
Kevolution." Plucky little under-housemaid I 
How little we know all that we do ! 

Nowadays the family still maintains its old 
traditions. Staunch and sincere Catholics, 
their courtesy and tolerance is a marvel. 
Madame and her daughter nurse, and Monsieur 
is a branchard from time to time at Lourdes, 
and Our Lady of Lourdes has a leafy shrine 
in the woods, whither the village gathers yearly 
for Monsieur's great Fete-day. We English 
oflScers belong to another world, yet they have 
opened heart and home to us since first we set 
up our works in the valley, because of what 
England has done for France. Here one can 
see French womanhood as it used to be, and as 
one fears it is ceasing to be. One wonders, in 
the streets, if there is purity left among the 
women of France, but here one can find it. 
Grace of manner and yet modern knowledge, 
simple faith and yet honest patriotism, kindness 
and yet perfect modesty — there are some of us 
who will carry back over the seas to the new 
lands, where we would fain plant these things 



32 STANDING BY 

if we could, a very tender remembrance of the 
old chateau. 

One Sunday morning I was free to go to 
church, and that service, so commonplace to 
them, meant much to me. Madame played the 
harmonium, and her daughters and a few vil- 
lage girls made up the choir. Their singing 
was exquisite. I know, now, what trouble that 
little group at the back take that the simple 
Gregorian Agnus and Kyrie shall be perfect, 
and how Madame will hurry back from a Paris 
visit so as not to miss her Sunday labour for the 
glory of God. But I did not know then, and it 
was a wonder to hear the clear trained voices 
ring out over the kneeling black-clothed peas- 
antry that filled the little sanctuary as the priest 
at the altar before the fifteenth-century statue 
of our Eedemption offered the eternal Sacri- 
fice. So quiet was the little church, set in its 
humble churchyard, with the tall thick-set iron 
crosses starting like a forest about it, with the 
great trees spread out all around, and with the 
sun drawing rich scents from flower and gar- 
den, I had thought to find a simple worship, but 
not quite this. 

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere 
nobis, rang out the young voices, and the music 
of them was bitter-sweet to the soul. The 
wounded Lamb is so vividly real to-day. 

Monsieur is the Mayor. He farms his lands 
and shoots over them in the old-time way, and 



VILLAGE AND CHATEAU 33 

he is exceedingly courteous in the drawing- 
room. In church he sits with the principal men 
in a seat near the altar, his only son, too young 
as yet, thank God, for the scythe of War, be- 
side him. Unquestionably Monsieur is a gen- 
tleman, and one sees the true democracy Sun- 
day by Sunday in that church. The old priest, 
who must now serve three parishes, bustles 
down in his vestments and finds no incongruity 
in a whispered conference with Monsieur before 
he gives out the notices, just as he would shuf- 
fle in alongside him, vestments and all, if an- 
other were to preach. He looks at us over his 
spectacles, and he reads some episcopal letter, 
very dull and very long, in lieu of sermon. You 
would not say he was a great power, and he cer- 
tainly does nothing to make his services "at- 
tractive." Eome rarely does, yet she draws 
still. And as for that pastor, he never yet came 
between a soul and its God, but he has brought 
God back to half the village. 

And so out we come into the sun, and the 
villagers curtsey to Madame and stand bare- 
headed before Monsieur despite the legend of 
Equality over the church door. And the fam- 
ily are all smiles, and very simple in their talk 
before they slip in through the little gate. And 
I go on down the hill, and wonder if the age of 
that aeroplane yonder that sails by, high in the 
sunlight, should it destroy finally the ancient 
landmarks, will ever produce finer than this. 



V 

AEMY CHAPLAINS 

WE have just finished a conference — 
not a very big one, but a small gath- 
ering of padres from a South Af- 
rican Corps — and I have but now come in from 
a meditative walk along the plage. A grey sea 
was rolling heavily in, and the old castle and 
the new, now transformed, Casino, both looked 
melancholy. Little groups battled against the 
wind — two or three poilus, a group of Waacs, 
a small party of convalescing officers. And I 
walked up and down and asked myself the ques- 
tion: Why are there chaplains in the British 
Army at all? 

Chaplains, of course, serve an extremely use- 
ful purpose, and I make no doubt that the 
Higher Command would probably be very sorry 
to see us go. In that event, another depart- 
ment would, I take it, be created to carry on 
what we do; surely, indeed, only the fact that 
our democracy is still rather a lumbering un- 
socialistic affair prevents the formation into a 
regular department of what has all but taken 
our place. I refer, of course, to the Y.M.C.A. 

34 



ARMY CHAPLAINS S5 

and its kindred institutions. The Y.M.C.A. 
really does, on a well-organised and much more 
efficient scale, all that the Army asks of the 
Chaplains' Department — with the exception, 
perhaps, of funerals, which could, of course, be 
arranged easily. It keeps the men's spirits up ; 
it provides them with amusements ; it offers a 
flavouring of religion, sufficiently toned down 
so as not to hurt anyone's feelings (except 
those of the R.C.'s, who stand entirely by them- 
selves in the view of the Army) ; and it is a 
thoroughly successful business concern. This 
is not meant in the least to the detriment of 
the Y.M.C.A., for which service I have had dis- 
tinct thoughts of applying, and it should not 
hurt anyone's feelings, for it is, after all, what 
the Y.M.C.A. sets out to do. Its religious stand- 
point, as one sees it in the Army, could be ad- 
mirably expressed by the words of a colonel in 
a recent issue of the Spectator. He hoped the 
Established National Church would come out 
in its true colours, follow "the clue" which the 
Great Example left us, and be "just a communi- 
ty of men and women who are content to agree 
upon certain things which no one seriously dis- 
putes, and to count the disputable things as 
merely trappings or ornaments." These are 
wonderful words which repay study. As a 
matter of fact, that is the religion of the Y.M. 
C.A. which, in France, is a great deal more Es- 
tablished and National than the Church. The 



36 STANDING BY 

colonel certainly seems justified, inasmuch as 
the Y.M.C.A. is amazingly successful. Every- 
one speaks well of it. We are all welcomed into 
it. It even smiles on a person like myself, and 
gives me tea and biscuits because I wear a Mal- 
tese Cross, and utterly disarms me. 

But one comes back to the original question : 
Why, then, are there chaplains in the British 
Army at all? I suppose the real answer is that 
there always have been, and that there are peo- 
ple in England who would be annoyed if there 
were not. That is really sufficient for an Eng- 
lish Government, especially as it has its own in- 
imitable way of dealing with such a matter. 
Like an out-of-date statute, one would never re- 
peal the Chaplains' Department. Instead the 
English spirit is to smile at it, or bully it, 
as is most convenient ; coax it into doing work 
for which it was never intended; and finally 
convince it that that is its best and real work, 
although it keeps another name. In pursuance 
of the first of these methods, camps are always 
cleaned up on Sunday, extra parades and in- 
spections are always arranged for Sunday 
("Very sorry, Padre, but we couldn't help it"), 
and the men are always on the verge of break- 
down on a Sunday, so that it is a shame to allow 
more than twenty minutes for a service. Or 
chaplains are given large areas to cover, and 
then find it all but impossible, and in any case 
heart-breaking, to get about, thanks to the diffi- 



ARMY CHAPLAINS 87! 

culty of movement orders and the fact that 
petrol is so scarce that it cannot be spared for 
us. So, the Padre plodding wearily along on a 
heavy Government bicycle, the Colonel roars 
by in a motor-car on real duty, and a dispatch- 
rider passes on a motor-bicycle going to town 
to fetch a pound of butter for the mess. 

In pursuance of the second method, that of 
coaxing the Padre into doing work for which 
he "was not intended, the procedure is particu- 
larly charming. ''Oh, elect the Padre to be 
mess-president; he's just the man, and he's got 
the time." ''Padre, censor these letters, will 
you, like a good chap; I'm fearfully busy." 
"Padre, couldn't you get some sports for us?'* 
' ' Padre, find out the local talent and arrange a 
concert, will you?" And the Padre does, since 
method one gives him time for method two. 
This is not a grouse, nor is it a fairy tale ; it is 
just a fact. The other day a friend of mine 
arrived at a camp. "Awfully sorry," said the 
Commandant, "but really, you know. Padre, 
there's no time for a service." (Details fol- 
lowed.) "But stay to dinner with us, won't 
you, like a good chap?" And at dinner, ex- 
pansive, the same Commandant genially re- 
marked, "By the way, Padre, couldn't you get 
up a concert for us?" 

"Oh!" said the Padre, "so you've time for a 
concert, but not for a parade service?'* 

"By jove, capital joke!" roared the Com- 



88 STANDING BY 

mandant, perfectly sincere and not meaning in 
the least to hurt. There are others, of course, 
who do, but I purposely refrain from speaking 
of them as I might. I should be told they were 
rare exceptions and there would be a contro- 
versy in the Church Times. 

Now I say we have no right to grouse, for the 
Army is perfectly right in its way. Nine Eng- 
lishmen out of ten no longer desire the religious 
system in which a special order of ministers is 
a necessity. All they ask of a padre is that he 
shall be a genial, all-around, broad-minded (how 
often have I heard that!) good chap, a smoker, 
not averse to a glass of whisky and soda, ath- 
letic, and a speaker who will speak straight out 
on conunon-sense things like clean living at bot- 
tom, duty, honesty, patriotism, gentlemanli- 
ness, good-humour, broad-mindedness. And 
one curious phenomenon results : nine times out 
of ten the chaplain is a thoroughly popular per- 
son, for quite a large percentage of chaplains 
are what I have described above. But even this 
has its humorous side: chaplains are liked in 
the individual but not in the abstract. Every 
man you meet, when he gets to know you, will 
tell you what a rattling fine chap his own chap- 
lain is; but every man who meets you looks 
stony, and shuts up, in restaurant, carriage, or 
bar, until he knows you. And I think I see 
why. Englishmen do not like or want the 
things for which they think the Chaplains' De- 



ARMY CHAPLAINS 89 

partment stands, but once tliey suppose your 
particular view-point is a kind of Y.M.C.A. 
outlook, they are deliglited. 

So, as I kicked stones along the beach, I wor- 
ried back to the old question: "Why are there 
chaplains in the British Army at all? From 
the Army point of view it is because it is Brit- 
ish and conservative; from ours it must be 
either because we mean to convert the Army to 
our idea of a chaplain, or because it is a good 
shield under which to do Y.M.C.A. work. 
That, too, is peculiarly British. Those of us 
who hope for the first are going the queerest 
way to work to get it ; and those of us who hope 
for the second are muddle-headed, because they 
have already converted the nation, and the 
shield is no longer needed. I am certain half 
the chaplains in France might as well join in 
to the Y.M.C.A. right away. It would be a 
strength to that organisation and an economy 
to the Army. Consider our conference, for ex- 
ample. First, the O.C. congratulated us on 
the work we had done in keeping the boys fit 
and cheerful — whch was mostly more conven- 
tional than true. Then we fell to discussion — 
whether it would be better to purchase magic- 
lanterns than cinematographs; bands; mar- 
quees; organs; gramophones; night schools; 
our financial relationship with the Society that 
supplies us with material; the food, dress, and 
accommodation of our native chaplains ; and so 



40 STANDING BY 

on. Perhaps these are the things a conference 
would discuss, but they are also a fair indication 
of by far the greater part of our activities. Oh 
yes, and we talked of printing a common hymn- 
book to suit us all, and took it for granted that 
chaplains should be distributed on a territorial 
and not a sectarian basis. It was exactly the 
Y.M.C.A. 

However, I will not jest, for it is a moot point 
whether or not the Y.M.C.A. is not a sounder 
institution than the Catholic religion. Horrible 
as that sounds to some of us, I know several 
chaplains who came out here on the other side, 
and who have since been solidly converted to 
this standpoint. One has to consider the great- 
est good of the largest number. These men 
affirm that the two methods cannot be combined, 
which I well believe. If a man sets out to act 
as a priest and to convert, he will do it better 
by being unlike than by being like other men. 
Such a man would set the Sacraments first ; he 
would be genial, perhaps, but Christianity is an 
austere religion in a way; and he would spend 
his spare time in study and prayer. The in- 
evitable follows. This was the method of Christ 
and His apostles, and it brought disturbance in 
its train. It sets on fire the earth. There is 
always argument in the mess, and it is very 
doubtful if guerilla argmnents on religion in 
a mess do any good ; it rules out of any minis- 
trations at all the majority of those for whom 



ARMY CHAPLAINS 41 

one can do something otherwise; and it does 
not fulfil the desire of the War Office for chap- 
lains. 

On the other hand, the Padre who is an ' * all- 
round good sport" finds his hands full with 
kindly occupations. He easily attains a certain 
amount of influence, and checks the coarser im- 
moralities. He can do a great deal to introduce 
a healthy atmosphere into a camp, and can be 
a real friend to the men. He will be quoted as 
solving in his person all religious controversies, 
and he will thus do more than he knows towards 
the creation of that public opinion which will 
ultimately establish the Y.M.C.A. religion. Let 
us put it even stronger : he will encourage peo- 
ple to love their neighbour and speak respect- 
fully of God ; to live happily and to die without 
fear. 

The whole question resolves itself very 
simply, therefore, into a question as to whether 
you believe Christianity to be a dogmatic, sac- 
ramental, sacerdotal religion, or whether you 
believe it to be a theistic system of ethics. Be- 
yond doubt, the Army in France, the Y.M.C.A., 
and a majority of chaplains believe it to be the 
latter. In which case I grow furious with the 
demand that we should say so right out and 
have done with it. Abolish the Chaplains' De- 
partment and establish the Y.M.C.A. Knock 
on the head the miserable petty squabbles that 
separate us at home — ^matters of musty history, 



42 STANDING BY 

of lingering enmities, of obscure philosophies. 
This is a new age, and we want to step out into 
it unencumbered. A great confederation of sin- 
cere kindly people, pledged to service for com- 
mon brotherhood, and to a reverence towards 
God, a community (how does it go!) ''who are 
content to agree upon certain things which no 
one seriously disputes, and to count the dis- 
putable things as merely trappings," — this 
would be a real power on the earth, at least for 
a while. 

There is nothing more annoying in the world 
than bad logic and indecision. It is these two 
things which alone prevent the attainment of 
this ideal. For example, Methodist ministers, 
whose battle for the abolition of priesthood is 
all but won, are daily setting the clock back by 
taking to Roman collars and clerical airs ; while 
Catholic clergYj whose aim to reform or break 
the Church of England was all but accom- 
plished, are daily convincing the Army that 
they are merely men amongst men. Or again, 
we have long since largely scrapped the Prayer 
Book and a great deal of traditional ritual in 
France. The official Parade Service has se- 
cured at a blow all that Prayer Book reform 
has been fighting for, and no one dreams of 
sticking to the State Prayers or the Athanasian 
Creed. All over the place, chaplains have 
evening Communions, usually with coloured 
stoles, wafer bread, and altar lights. Ajid yet, 



ARMY CHAPLAINS 43 

illogically and indecisively, the old squabbles 
go on in England, and the old hopeless ways 
that are neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red 
herring. Kikuyu happens every week in France 
somewhere, and yet the Bishops still suppose 
a Lambeth Conference must debate about it. 
The C.M.S. Bishop of Khartoum prints prayers 
for the dead for the use of all chaplains, and 
yet the Low Church Party still think it is a 
matter in dispute. My comrade, the Methodist 
Padre, uses wafer bread and will not allow the 
displacement of Crucifix and Madonna when he 
uses our Altar, and yet folk at home are still 
prepared to act as if they lived in a century 
in which people attached importance to these 
things. 

No, chaplains are an anomaly in the B.E.F. 
The Department is a foolish waste of men, 
money, and time. The greater part of it should 
be absorbed by the Y.M.C.A., and the rest 
should become Roman Catholic. Not that I 
suppose either will happen; we are English. 



VI 
PARIS 

IONDON is the Business House of the East- 
ern Hemisphere, and is a grim kind 
-* of place. It has its gaieties, but they 
are exotic, and the gaieties of people who relax 
a little from the strain of work; and if one is 
inclined to be contemptuous of the work that is 
transacted there, London is a place of which 
one is glad to see the last. I admit that I al- 
ways revisit it wonderingly. In London people 
are more deluded than anysvhere else in the 
world, for the importance of the business of 
which it is the Central House is nothing but 
a nightmare of the imagination. Of all vanities, 
nothing is more vain than the making of money, 
and the life, which commonly attends it, of re- 
spectable, unemotional, conventional, middle- 
class existence. London is Earth. 

Paris, on the contrary, is the International 
Toy Shop, and toys are symbols of the big 
things of life. You can only have symbols 
down here, and the great thing is to love and 
use your toys, knowing that they are but toys, 
but for all that symbols of eternity. And this 

44 



PARIS 45 

is what people do in Paris. They live. They 
indulge the emotions by which our souls ex- 
press themselves. They are gay; they love; 
they pray. All these things are done in Paris, 
as nowhere else, with all the strength of body 
and soul. So ought they to be done. Paris, 
therefore, is Heaven and Hell. 

Contrast the way these two cities have taken 
the War. London, having maintained previous- 
ly, through a false sense of its own importance, 
that its Credit Business System was making 
War impossible, declared generally that it 
would be over by Christmas, and that in the 
meantime Business must go on as usual. The 
war, in 1914, did not really worry London, and 
Business did go on. The Powers that Be in 
London, certain that this was the admirable at- 
titude, did their best to encourage it, and care- 
fully suppressed news that might upset Busi- 
ness. London learned of Mons after the Marne, 
but did not understand either even then. But 
once War had shown the vanity of the idea that 
Business could check the progress of its grim 
realities, London began to tura to and make a 
business of War. To-day, as I write, War has 
become London's chief occupation. Life is or- 
ganised for it from the breakfast-table to the 
office, with the most satisfactory result to Lon- 
don. We are now meeting the Teutonic busi- 
ness of War with the Anglo-Saxon. Chivalry, 
stupid self-sacrifice, heroics, agony — all these 



46 STANDING BY 

we are obliterating as hard as we can. War is 
now organised and business-like murder. The 
other things are bound to obtrude a little, to 
our shame, but for the most part our war ma- 
chine is running smoothly, and we grind a few 
kilometres into chaos and take them at the 
smallest possible cost as often as the factories 
allow us — and that is very often now. It is 
an incredibly efficient business, and London is 
beginning to be quite content with it. 

Paris, on the other hand, always expected 
War, and embraced it at once as she embraces 
every other reality of life. We can only dimly 
visualise the stupendous things she did. Her 
chivalry blazed like a flame to heaven ; her flesh 
and blood, flung heroically pell-mell into the 
jaws of the iron machine of Prussia, bled white 
into what would have been, without the Allies, 
as heroic an epic of death as that of 1870; and 
in her churches her agony writhed before the 
altars till Calvary and it were one. But Paris 
opened her eyes amazedly at last to find she 
still lived. She is beginning to find out why, 
to find out that she has become a partner in 
the efficient business proposition that London 
has floated, a proposition so shrewd that New 
York could no longer keep out. She has gasped, 
shrugged her shoulders, submitted like a 
sensible woman — and to a great extent lost 
interest. 

That is what one feels in Paris. She is not 



PARIS 47 

a traitor to the Allied Cause for a moment, 
but War has become a business and she has 
gone back to life. A leave in Paris bewilders 
one. In the whirl of taxis, in the crowded 
restaurants, passing the glittering shop-fronts, 
love-making on the boulevards, intoxicating 
oneself in the music-halls, one would not know 
of "War. Paris is fondling the toys again with 
all her heart and soul as London never did or 
can; and those who always loved the symbols 
in the churches, ever appropriate to War but 
now dear anew with blood and tears, handle 
them, if it be possible, with even deeper passion. 
Thus it is a wonderful Nemesis that the Ger- 
mans have met at the hands of London and 
Paris. Neither city ever believed it possible 
that so monstrous a thing could be as the mak- 
ing of a business of War. Each human in her 
own way, neither London nor Paris believed 
that Berlin could really cease to be human and 
become diabolical. But man is finer than the 
devil. London, having grasped the awful fact, 
set her teeth to build up a business — cleaner, 
but a business — to oppose to his; and Paris, 
heart of humanity, lovable, laughing, passionate 
Paris, awakening, flings him a look of unutter- 
able disgust and turns away her head. The 
Prussian monster is crushed by the strength of 
a man, and scorned by the soul of a woman. 



48 STANDING BY 

It is a strange experience to come from native 
Africa to London and Paris, if one loves Africa. 
It is to pass from wide unstained sunlit spaces, 
unconquered silent mountains, the sights and 
smells and sounds of natural living, and the un- 
trammelled life of man, to the crown and flower 
of Civilisation. That strange twisted will of 
man has energised for centuries, and the story 
of its labour is the history of Civilisation, and 
the height of its attainment London and Paris. 

One rejects it in either city, but one is 
tempted longer by Paris, for in London civilisa- 
tion is restrained, in Paris it is not. In London 
— the real London — it is restrained, and it is so 
dreadfully dull. I wonder sometimes if Time 
can show a more pathetic spectacle than the 
life of London. One result, I think, of that 
twisted will in man, is the desire to hide, which 
is, after all, the most ancient story in the world. 
But the bushes of the garden and;Jhe fig-leaves 
were only our initial experiments. We went 
on to the diversion of every possible thing into 
fig-leaves to cover our nakedness. In London 
you can see the process marvellously consum- 
mated. In politics, in religion, in social life, 
they ever seek fresh fig-leaves and deceive 
themselves. I do not know what Mother Eve 
did to keep her fig-leaves in place, but now- 
adays we do it with conventions. If one is too 
rough with conventions, dreadful things 
threaten, for the onlookers promptly spy out 



PARIS 49 

nakednesses ; but if one is not rongli witli them, 
the man who, for example, loves native Africa, 
stifles horribly. 

Personally, it is in religion that I feel this 
thing most, and, to be frank, in Church of Eng- 
land religion, for one cannot help feeling that 
nine Protestant chapels out of ten have really 
ceased to have any real religion at all. At 
least I think the chief part of religion is wor- 
ship, and traffic with the spiritual world, and 
growth in a detachment whose flower will be im- 
pulsive charity of the spirit unostentatiously 
expressing itself; but Protestantism seems to 
be largely sermons, organised relief works, and 
temperance legislation. In the Church of Eng- 
land, then, one is slowly suffocated. The world, 
surely, cannot have seen before such an awful 
civilisation of religion, and that in all but every 
place. We go on using the old terms, but if sin 
be sin, how can it be confessed to the drone of 
a note in a crowd ; if God be God, how can one 
dictate to Him precise needs in classical Eng- 
lish; if worship be worship, how can one wor- 
ship to the word of command ; if divine author- 
ity be divine authority, how can it condescend 
to hair-splitting quibbles only fit for politics? 
In a word, if religion means anything, it means 
the abandonment of oneself to God, indifferent 
to appearances; and in England, even in re- 
ligion, it is improper to abandon oneself, and 
appearances are everything. 



60 STANDING BY 

Now this is no treatise on the reform of Eng- 
lish religion; if it is anything, it is just a com- 
parison of London and Paris. In Paris, then, 
one sees what it would be impossible to see in 
London, and I shall illustrate what I mean by 
Montmartre, High Mass at Notre Dame, and a 
visit to Notre Dame des Victoires. 

Montmartre is an Act of Faith, of course, but 
there is something so abandoned and childlike 
about it that it brings tears to the eyes. Old 
and young, rich and poor have built it, and their 
names are carved on the stones they have given : 
the lady who took me round, showed me the 
stone the village children of her catechism class 
had given their sous to buy. They built it high 
above Paris, as if there were some triumph of 
love even in that! The Government is trying 
to build in front of it to hide it — as if there were 
some triumph in that. It is big and white and 
costly, but it is not like the Gothic cathedrals. 
Inside it is colour and gilt and electric light, 
which is exactly what it should be. These are 
the decorations that the children of our age 
love; and of what in London we are ashamed, 
choosing more conventional decorations to hide 
our nakedness, Paris gives with both hands. 
And on any weekday probably more people wor- 
ship at Montmartre than in all the churches 
of London put together. Night and day it has 
been open since the War. Thousands of names 
for intercession are sent in every week, and 



PARIS 51 

their figures are posted at the doors. And 
above all, Christ shows His Sacred Heart, 
which is a figure so humanly simple and senti- 
mental that English religion is positively 
shocked at it. 

Then that War-Sunday at Notre Dame stands 
out as unforgettable. The river and the island 
lay like a water-colour, with a faint blue sky 
above and a gleam of rainy autumn sunshine 
in the air. The trees were golden and brown, 
and, from the east, graceful and tender the ca- 
thedral. They had begun when we came in. 
We found seats far down the nave, among a 
strange crowd, many in uniform. Far away 
the mysteries of religion were being performed. 
I formulated to myself, for the first time, the 
realisation that Humanity has gathered, in 
Catholicism, the Christ-story to its heart, and 
made of it a world-religion. It is impossible 
to have a sense of pageantry and beauty, and 
of music and of art, and to use them only for 
Lord Mayors' shows and the openings of Par- 
liament, unless, as in England, these things are 
lightly held, and not understood to be our sacra- 
ments of reality. No : once the Faith of Human- 
ity had gripped the Christ-story, the Love of 
Humanity demanded its expression. High 
Mass at Notre Dame is a worthy expression. 
It is Catholic, for everywhere Humanity has 
striven for expression — in India, China, or in 
the ancient world — it has expressed itself as 



52 STANDING BY 

here. Matins in St. Paul's, or even a sung 
Eucharist, is a totally different thing. It is 
the congregation that is catered for in London ; 
it is Almighty God in Paris. Yet the congre- 
gation of Notre Dame was more reverent than 
that of St. Paul's, and I believe it knew its way 
about in what was going forward, so exquisitely 
but so far away, better as well. It punctuated 
the Liturgy correctly; half St. Paul's cannot 
find the collect for the day. And so the music 
rolled and thundered, not that I might sing or 
be edified, but that God might be glorified ; and 
in contrast, the light streamed down those an- 
cient walls, again, on a priest whose thin voice 
only faintly reached me and finally failed alto- 
gether, which did not matter, for he was not 
talking to me but to God. Curiously, too, that 
silence drew my soul nearer to the Mercy-Seat 
than the most musical minor canon at his cele- 
bration whom I have ever heard. 

There was that extraordinarily instructive in- 
cident too which one sees so often in France. 
A priest came round collecting what we would 
give him for himself and his brethren. AU 
priests of great Gods do that — Buddhist, Hindu, 
or Catholic. I believe there is a philosophy of 
religion hidden in that act, stupid as it may 
read. Imagine the Dean of St. Paul's collect- 
ing alms on Sunday, and saying ''Thank you" 
to each sou or sovereign. He does collect, of 
course, but not like that : he collects in fig-leaves. 



PARIS 63 

All we English clergy follow suit: we prompt 
church-wardens, and arrange sidesmen and 
sustentation funds, and label our offertories 
"Church Expenses." We do almost anything 
short of going round ourselves like Buddhist 
monks or Catholic priests. It is not gentle- 
manly. But priests are not ashamed to be 
servants and beggars in the name of the living 
God. 

And the night I left Paris to return to duty I 
saw one last scene. One cannot compare it with 
anything that is really London at all, and I shall 
not try to do so. For I pushed open the door 
of Notre Dame des Victoires, a church I had 
never entered before, just about dinner-time at 
night. I have no idea what the church is really 
like, for I have read no guide-book of it nor 
seen even the exterior that I remember by day- 
light, and I do not want to have any idea. For 
that dark autumn evening the great Painter 
laid the strokes of His brush upon my soul. It 
was dark, and the radiance that blazed from 
what seemed to be a kind of transept did not 
reach me directly, but burgeoned out pillar and 
buttress and statue in shadow against pale gold. 
Cautiously I went up among the chairs and the 
ever-thickening congregation, till I saw. Above 
the altar stood the white image, and below, like 
flame-flowers in a breeze, fluttered scores of 
candle-flames, that grew as worshippers added 
each his light. The darkness pressed in 



54 STANDING BY 

around, but that radiance lit up the faces of 
those who prayed. Ah ! they prayed — a widow 
at the altar rails, a poilu by a pillar, the dainty 
girl at my side, yonder old beggar-man. God! 
how they prayed, the hundreds of them, for 
there were hundreds there, without service or 
priest or music at all. And it was no special 
day or hour; but night and day, since August, 
1914, so have they prayed. They are praying 
there now ... in a sense, for me. . . . 

At the door a white sister was asking money, 
quietly, for missions in the Sudan. I saw a 
blue-coated private of the line give silver; a 
woman offer also, so poor that I think her offer- 
ing must have had the value of gold. As for 
me, I knew that I had insisted on remaining 
so rich that I had really nothing to give, and I 
went past, and out, ashamed. 



VII 

OLD BILL 

SO you find time to read a good deal?" I 
asked. 
''Yes," said he; "I think I keep 
wonderfully up to date. You'll find them all 
over there — What we think about Tommy: 
What Tommy thinks about us (or what we think 
Tommy thinks about us) : and The Church as it 
is, as it should be, as it will be, as it might be, 
as it was meant to be, as we have made it, as it 
has made us, as it would be if it had made us 
something — anything — except what we are, and 
so on, rather endlessly. And if you really plan 
to write the book you've been outlining to me, 
you will probably put this conversation into it, 
and then your book will go into the soap-box 
too." 

He waved his pipe towards the corner of the 
dug-out, and I got up and crossed over to have 
a look. The soap-box was half buried in the 
earth wall and wedged up with the noses of two 
9.2 German shells. It was full of books about 
religion and the War, as he said, but there was 
room for another there, at any rate. 

55 



66 STANDING BY 

''Well," said I, coming back to my upturned 
tin pail, ''what do you make of them all?" 

He looked at me reflectively, as he used to 
look from the depth of his arm-chair at Cam- 
bridge when I had thought him an acute, clever 
young don, and never suspected that an embryo 
army chaplain, with a reputation for cool gal- 
lantry, unquenchable humour, and immense hu- 
manity, sat there. 

"Make of them all?" he repeated cautiously. 

"Yes," said I, not seeing the drift. 

"As a whole I think they are a great sign of 
the times. That's one of the few things that 
are quite clear, and it's well worth considering. 
There 's not a shadow of doubt that that body of 
religious men who thought, before the War, 
that religion wanted restating, and the religion 
of the Church of England especially, reforming, 
have come to their own. They have found an 
excuse for articulation, and an opportunity 
such as no reformers of our day have ever had. 
They have won recruits. It is inconceivable, 
I think, that they will not make an upheaval. 
If they do not, at any rate it will be the cen- 
tral disappointment of my life." 

I assented. "That goes without saying," I 
said. 

" It 's a pity when it does, ' ' he retorted. ' ' Just 
now you've got to get the simple facts clear 
or you get nowhere. And it's the simple initial 



OLD BILL 57 

facts that lead one farthest. Now what strikes 
you among all that host of writers?" 

I turned them over in my mind, but I suppose 
it is not much of a mind. James never thought 
so, anyway. ''Give me a match, old man," I 
said, ' ' and continue the lecture. ' ' 

He smiled. "You always were an old ass, 
Bobbie," he said. "The thing that strikes me 
is that there is no new prophet among them. I 
mean — look at them — they are all parsons who 
write. I know there's a Donald Hankey or so, 
but they're the same class. There's Mr. Wells; 
but Mr. Wells, in his own way, is a professional 
prophet too. There'll be you ; but you're a pro- 
fessional prophet. The only person who has 
not written about the religion of Tommy is 
Tommy. The only person who has not written 
about the rehabilitation of religion is the person 
for whom we all want it rehabilitated. And 
that is remarkable, because it's a real religious 
movement that's on foot. There is a stirring 
among the dry bones, but the bones that are 
stirring are not the valleyf ul that we 've always 
been anxious about. If this War had quickened 
religion among the men in the street, who, as one 
of those fellows justly says, are simply Tom- 
mies in the trenches, then from the men in the 
street would have come a prophet with judg- 
ment to begin at the House of God. I think it's 
amazing that no such one has come. The thing 
that astounds me, that reduces me all but to 



68 STANDING BY 

despair in certain moods, that certainly shows 
me our professional failure more plainly than 
all the books, is the fact that this War has 
come, with all its awful reality, and never raised 
a prophet from among the people. ' ' 

We smoked on in silence, and he began again 
in a minute, warming to his words : 

''What I mean is this," he said. ''Here's 
this War, confronting the masses of our people 
with life and death in all their tremendous im- 
portance, throwing a blinding searchlight on 
the Church, stirring us to the depths of our 
souls, laying naked before us the exceeding 
need of ourselves and all men, so that we cry 
out, 'How can we exhibit Christ as the Satis- 
fier, as the Saviour? How can we vitalise our 
creeds and credal-forms and credal-worship, to 
carry us onT, and yet the mass of men never 
seem to cry that at all ! And don't be mistaken, 
no human need exists -without some offer of sat- 
isfaction being forced up by that need. If the 
men had made to themselves a new god out of 
this War, I shouldn't have been surprised: one 
would have known what to do. But they do 
not seem to feel the need of a god at all — ^in the 
mass, I mean. I am so sure of this, that I some- 
times wonder if there are not two alternatives, 
one or the other of which must be true. Per- 
haps both have truth in them. Maybe the men 
have made themselves a new god and that he 
has his prophets, and we don't realise it; or 



OLD BILL 69 

maybe they are really content with the old god 
they have got. ' ' 

I hardly caught the last words for the roar 
of a near explosion, and I half started from my 
seat. Jimmy did not move. As the noise died 
down he reached for a cigarette, and said : 

''It was too late to do anything, and besides 
there was nothing to do. One gets used to it. 
Maybe it hits the trench; maybe it doesn't. If 
it doesn't, there's no need for worry; if it does, 
there's no good in worrying too soon." 

I accepted the dictum, and took him back to 
the conversation. ''What new god might they 
have found?" I asked. 

"How about Old Bill!" he queried calmly. 

I confess I was a little shocked. "Good 
heavens, man," I said, "what do you mean!" 

"Well," he said, "let's be frank. Old Bill 
symbolises what the men like to see in others 
and want to see in themselves. He stands for 
a frame of mind that works. A fellow like that 
goes through this Hell and comes out on the 
other side, if he's lucky, sane. That's the test; 
that's what they want. That kind of spirit is a 
gospel to them. They like to read of it, to see 
it pictorially, to reach out after it. It's found 
its prophet or prophets. Old Bill is as sound 
philosophy in reality as the ones with more 
dignified names: analysed, one might say he 
stands for optimism, humour, comradeship, 
bravery, common sense. And the great point is 



60 STANDING BY 

that he is within reach. He is within you. You 
can work at moulding him inside yourself ; you 
can appeal to his type of man, quote him, de- 
velop him ; you can pin him up on the wall and 
admire him. In other religions one calls these 
things meditation, prayer, worship." 

''Good Lord!" I fear I said, astounded. 

''Well, Bobbie," he said, "this isn't a time 
to fool round with things. Can you question 
the facts? You've seen the men — travelled 
with them, talked to them, watched them day 
and night, much the same as I. Of course Old 
Bill is only one materialisaton of the thing; for 
aught I know, thousands of Tommies have 
never seen a Bairnsfather picture, though I 
doubt it. But the facts are there. It's the type 
that cheers a thousand waiting men on the 
quay-side in the winter's rain when the leave 
boat's late; it's that sort that any forty men 
packed into a truck — 'Hommes 40, Chevaux (en 
long) 8' — love to have with them; it's that type 
that they tell stories of after an advance. You 
and I don't come in much on those occasions. 
Of course the men are very decent; there are 
scores of chaplains who buck things up; but 
which do you think they'd choose for a twelve 
hours' journey, or a half-hour's visit to a hos- 
pital ward — Old Bill or a chaplain?" 

"Old Bill," said I promptly. 

"Exactly," said he. "Then if we are right, 
that's what we've got to face. Not to face it is 



OLD BILL 61 

to play with facts, which is what most of those 
books do. We are worrying about the Apostles' 
Creed; the men aren't interested in it. They 
don't care two straws about it. It neither helps 
nor cheers them, and therefore they don't want 
it. Even the things that are approximately 
practical in it are not the things they care 
about. The Holy Catholic Church either means 
the Church of Rome, of which our lads know 
very little and care less, for they don't mean to 
have anything to do with it, or else it stands 
for 'religious people' generally, who have no 
unity, no coherence, and no weight whatever in 
the world of practical things. The Forgiveness 
of Sins — well, we've messed that up. The 
things the average parson calls sins, Tommy 
doesn't regard as disgraceful at all; in his heart 
of hearts he knows they don't spoil a good 
chum. And although he doesn't theorise over 
it, I believe he doesn't really think God is on 
the side of the parsons. If there is a God at all, 
He is a 'good fellow.' Good heavens! think of 
the Ten Commandments I Think of the futility 
of hammering away still at them! Why, good 
Lord, the first three, in their original meaning, 
no one dreams of breaking; the fourth, every- 
body, even the parsons, breaks continually; the 
fifth, Tommy keeps better than anyone else; 
the sixth, seventh, and eighth are on the statute 
books; the ninth is common charity; the tenth 
is absurd — everybody breaks it. What I mean 



62 STANDING BY 

is, the Commandments, as they stand, don't 
get home.''^ 

''But their spirit is magnificent," I ventured. 

''Of course it is, old dear," he said; "but 
what's the use of hanging on to obsolete forms 
as a fetish and trying to make out that they 
mean something they don't mean? The Fourth 
Commandment says: You shan't work on Sat- 
urday; you make it mean: You ought to go to 
Church on Sunday. Then why harp on saying 
the one when you mean the other? It's a fair 
illustration. That kind of performance simply 
confuses the issue." 

We sat silent a bit. It is not alwaj^-s noisy in 
the trenches : all one could hear was the rats. 

" 'The Eesurrection of the Body,' " my 
friend went on in a minute, and in a low tone. 
"Oh, Bobbie, you've been up here a bit, what 
do even you make of that? 'The Life Everlast- 
ing' " — ^he shrugged his shoulders — "this life 
is too damnable to Tommy in the trenches, too 
busy to Tommy out of them, for him to think 
much of that. Also it's incongruous ; it's wrap- 
ped up in out-of-date imaginations. To speak 
plainly, nobody has got much use for it. Ex- 
cept — well, 'God's a good fellow.' " 

"Then you think Christianity is played out?" 
I asked. 

He did not directly reply. Instead he said: 

' ' There 's a padre round here whom I should 
like you to meet. He swears a good deal, as 



OLD BILL 68 

they call it swearing in drawing-rooms; he 
drinks; he even kisses the girls in fun; he 
practically never preaches, but administers the 
Sacraments whenever he gets a chance; and 
when two men told him straight that they were 
living in adultery (just to see what he would 
say) he never said a word. He is always 
cheerful, utterly unselfish, has apparently no 
personal fear at all, is tender as a woman to 
the wounded, and is utterly indifferent to what 
anyone may think of him. His personal faith 
in the Apostles' Creed is like a rock, and if you 
ask him to pray with you, he will go down on his 
knees in a moment and talk to God as if He were 
on his right hand. The men can't make him 
out in the least, but they love him, they play 
the game when he 's around, and their language 
was incredible when they heard he was to be 
moved to another battalion. He helps them 
to live, and if anybody wants it, he helps them 
to die. What do you make of that?" 

"I don't know," I said. ''It's probably per- 
sonality; you couldn't have a ministry like 
that." 

"No?" he queried. 

"Well," said I, "could you?" 

"I don't know," he said. "Of course you 
couldn't have every indivdual in it as full of 
character as that chap, but you could have — 
you do have a something pretty near it." 

"Explain yourself," I said. 



64 STANDING BY 

He smiled. *' Let's get back to the soap-box. 
What else do you notice about it?" 

I stared at it, and for the life of me could see 
nothing. I said as much. 

He smiled again, whimsically. ' ' There aren 't 
any Roman Catholic writers there," he said. 

' ' Oh ! " I said weakly and slightly annoyed. 

*'0h, it's all very well, Bobbie," said he, ''but 
face facts. The only people who seem perfectly 
content with their religious system are the 
Catholics. I have not seen a single book de- 
manding its reform because it doesn't suit Tom- 
my. I've read half a dozen thanking God for 
the lives and deaths of Catholic soldiers, but 
that's all. And why!" 

I said nothing. 

''Well," said he, "I may be wrong, but I 
think they have unaccountably got hold of the 
right end of the stick. That padre I mentioned 
was an B.C. They have got a perfectly firm 
credal faith — practical, dogmatic, supernatural. 
Round those fixed points everything is allowed 
to be in a state of flux. It's most instructing. 
The Roman padre 's very language is a parable ; 
he uses Latin and Tommy's language. He 
usually swears a good deal, because he knows 
perfectly well that what you and I call swear- 
ing is not swearing at all, in the moral sense. 
He uses Latin, which is an extraordinarily good 
parable of his belief that he is the medium for 
the supply of a supernatural forgiveness and 



OLD BILL 65 

grace which turns, not on a man's intellectual 
understanding or culture or goodness, but on 
his sincerity and need. When the padre sees 
that need he supplies it; when he doesn't see 
it, he lives a cheerful, natural, straightforward, 
manly but also supernatural life, which men 
like and instinctively — perhaps unconsciously 
— envy. Such a padre wants very little 
changed. He is perfectly sure of his wealth, 
its source, and its supply ; he only wishes there 
were more beggars. If there are not, it is not 
his fault." 

I filled a pipe and lit it. "What about Old 
Bill?" I asked, blowing out the match. 

My friend did not smile. *'I don't quite 
know," he confessed. His voice dropped a 

little: "Sometimes, Bobbie But I don't like 

to say it, even to you. Perhaps I can put it this 
way: if Old Bill is what I take him to be, I be- 
lieve he would have worshipped Jesus Christ if 
he had met Him. I believe he would have died 
for Him. And the lads that follow Old Bill, 
they can't be far from the Kingdom, Bobbie, 
only they don't know it exists." 



F 



VIII 
FRENCH BELLS 

BENCH bells present themselves to the 
English mind — or ought to — as a re- 
markable phenomenon. It takes one a 
great while to get used to them, and after that 
they well repay a good deal of thought. I ad- 
mit that it has taken me about ten years to begin 
to understand them, but I believe that at last, 
since one has so much time for thinking during 
this War, I am getting to the bottom of the 
problem. And I believe that a whole philoso- 
phy of religion is to be found there. 

About ten years ago I came first to France 
in what I believed was a sympathetic and was 
certainly an inquiring frame of mind. I was 
very young, and, frankly, Roman Catholicism 
attracted me, while English religion bored me ; 
to-day, Roman Catholicism no longer ''at- 
tracts" — that is not nearly the right word — and 
English religion does far more than bore me; 
and looking back at it, I believe the bells have 
had a great deal to do with the change. The in- 
creasing irritation which Catholicism in Nor- 
mandy produced in me ten years ago, came to 

66 



FRENCH BELLS 67 

a head in their regard. At paper flowers and 
candles at all angles (and sham at that) I pre- 
tended that I could smile ; devotions with which 
I could not sympathise, I put down to foreign 
characteristics, and was indulgent. But I could 
not explain the bells. It really was annoying. 
Again and again, as enlightened Englishmen, 
we left our hotel at their call, only to find the 
services half through or no service going on at 
all. Once might have been a mistake, twice a 
coincidence, but it happened perpetually. In 
poor French we tried to arrive at an explana- 
tion, but it was not forthcoming; I think the 
sacristans thought us imbecile. And finally — 
in St. Lo, as I remember — having discovered 
that High Mass was at 10, and having rushed 
out at 9.30 in a hurry, supposing our watches 
to be wrong, only to find no sign of a service, 
I vowed I would not go to a Roman Catholic 
service in France again. 

The passage of the years helped me to see, 
by one way and another, that there was a great 
deal more in continental religion than I thought. 
There was that cathedral at Marseilles, into 
which I strayed at the dreadful hour of 5,30 
a. m. while waiting for a train, and, no bells hav- 
ing summoned them at all, probably a thousand 
people were at their prayers. There was that 
day in Bruges during which I doubt if the bells 
ever left off ringing at all, although there were 
considerable gaps between the services. And 



68 STANDING BY 

now here in France in war-time, I have solved 
the problem. The French bells are a perfect 
illustration of French religion, and they are 
about as different from English bells as it is 
possible to imagine. 

In England the direction of our bells is man- 
ward. We ring them to call people to church. 
They are a relic of the past, like calling 
churches after the names of saints, which we 
keep up because we have made the thing utili- 
tarian. There is, for example, an English hos- 
pital chapel in France called St. Winifred's, 
for that was the name of a beloved sister who 
died at her nursing, which is nice enough, but 
a perfect illustration of what I mean. It was 
not for any such reason that churches used to 
be named, and it is a good illustration of an in- 
credible English conservatism that the chaplain 
searched to see if there were a St. Winifred 
before he would permit it. So, then, with our 
bells. We want to tell people when to come to 
church for services ; we find bells ; we use them. 
We might use fog-horns or phonographs, or we 
might, as is now often urged, encourage people 
to be intelligent and use their own watches ; but 
finding bells, and not being able to conceive any 
other use for them, we use bells. 

In France, as in old times in England, this 
is the last use to which the bell is put. To be- 
gin with, they rarely have "services" in the 
French Church — services as we use the term. 



FRENCH BELLS 69 

Like all world-religions, the French keep 
priests who serve their God in a succession of 
rites, at which the faithful assist or not as they 
please. It does not make any difference to the 
rite if five people are there or five hundred. In 
England if five people only come to church the 
minister would probably cancel the service ; in 
France he would not know until afterwards — 
as likely as not then — how many had been in 
church at all. In England the people are im- 
portant, and they are called to come ; in France 
they are a very secondary part of the business. 
Besides that, if you drop into a French church 
any time between 5.30 and 9 in the morning, or 
later (if the church is of any size), you will be 
certain to find a service going on, so that it 
would be superfluous energy to announce the 
commencement of each. 

But the bells do ring — very much they ring; 
what, then, do they ring for? I can distinguish 
a multitude of uses, but all of them come to 
much the same thing, and all point in the same 
direction — the Godward direction. In England 
we ring bells because of the people ; in France 
they ring them because of God. 

The first great use of French bells, then, is 
for worship. They rank with organs and in- 
cense and lights and singing and carved stones 
and soaring steeples; they are part of man's 
offering to God, part of his expressioning of 
religion Godwards. The bells rang all that day 



70 STANDING BY 

in Bruges because the Blessed Sacrament was 
exposed all day, and a relic going about the 
streets. The other morning here in Havre 
nothing indicated that High Mass of All Saints 
began at 10 a.m., but, while the organ 
thundered, and incense rolled, and men bent, 
and the priest offered Godward the Divine 
Oblation, the bells of the old tower beat out 
their wildest and most joyous melody. One 
comes to listen for them just as one comes to 
look for the rest of worship. The deep diapason 
of a bell at Rouert, sounding solemnly and dimly 
within the stilled church during the Absolution 
of the Dead, is one of my keenest impressions 
yet of the Great War. 

They use bells so much in France, secondly, 
because they insist on worship being regarded 
as an integral part of daily life. It is by no 
manner of means a thing one does on Sundays ; 
it is a thing one does daily — or better, which 
is done daily — and at which one is expected to 
assist on all the days. The Day of the Resur- 
rection the Church insists should be a joyful 
holiday. On a holiday one ought by no means 
to omit the daily worship; indeed, whereas 
modern life may well compel its omission on 
work-days, the very fact of the holiday gives an 
opportunity which, since it is an opportunity, 
it would be a sin to miss. But on weekdays, if 
you cannot find time to come to church, you can 
adore in your heart for a brief second when 



FRENCH BELLS 71 

the Holy Sacrifice is consummated. So ring the 
bells : it is a useful bit of worship, for men at a 
distance can know of it, even if they cannot see 
the genuflection of the priest. Pray with the 
bells, too, say the French, at morning, midday, 
and evening, that all may hear a prayer too. 
xVnd ring them all the day, if the church is at 
prayer the livelong day as well. 

Then again there are the little bells for use 
within the church. Just as it is sometimes a 
black vestment and not a white, so it is some- 
times a clapper and not a bell. Both express 
the mind of the moment. That is why they ring 
the bells of the sanctuary during Mass, that 
people may have a common mind at certain mo- 
ments. And this is the most striking thing of 
all. 

In England our services are for the edifica- 
tion of the people. We have a genuinely demo- 
cratic religion. A successful sermon is one of 
which the people say, "How well he put that! 
That is exactly my point of view : I agree with 
every word of it. I shall certainly go again." 
All our prayers we say carefully aloud lest the 
people shall not hear. All our hymns we select 
equally conscientiously lest the people should 
not know them, and about our tunes and our 
ornaments we are still more careful lest the 
aesthetic sense of the people should be offended 
or debased. The minister represents the peo- 
ple, in the first place : the idea largely prevails 



72 STANDING BY 

that he should be chosen, as in Scotland, by the 
people to suit themselves. And this, then, is 
why Catholicism perplexes and annoys us. 

In a French church they do not care two 
straws what you do so long as you do not annoy 
your neighbours. You can kneel or sit or stand ; 
you can sing or you can be silent ; if you know 
what is going on, so much the better for you; 
if you do not, so much the worse. Nobody ever 
gives you a book in France, partly because you 
are not important enough, and partly because 
no one knows if you want it. But in all this 
freedom, the Church breaks in now and again. 
The priest metaphorically raps your knuckles 
and demands your attention. He knows his 
business and has been busy on it — that is what 
he is there to do; and presumably you know 
yours and have been busy on it as well ; but the 
moment has come and you must fall into line. 
You can, wherever you are ; for the least of us 
can bow the head in silent adoration. And the 
bell rings. 

But there are some things for which the 
French bells do not ring at all, and I am not 
sure that I do not like them best of all for that. 
In England the bells ring loudly that we may 
all come and stand in a body and confess our 
sins, and it is a very dreadful and hardening 
business. They ring loudly, too, that in a body 
we may go up to the Sacrament of Love, and, 
at a service, meet our Lord. But for Confes- 



FRENCH BELLS 73 

sion and Communion the French bells never 
or rarely ring. There are some things which 
the soul must do alone and in the silence as the 
Divine Spirit moves. My coming to Him in all 
my sorrow and weariness, His coming to me in 
all His love — who dare name time or season for 
this ? and the bells of France seem to answer — 
at least not they. 



IX 

THE HEART OF A CHH^D 

ONE of the most remarkable of the 
Isaiah prophecies always seems to me 
that which makes the child heart the 
controller of the new world to be. It was so 
essentially remote from the religious ideals of 
Judah and Israel, how remote, indeed, one only 
realises as one thinks that the God of the Old 
Testament is the God of the modern German, 
and there cannot be children left in Germany. 
Yet no, that is not so. It is the divine miracle 
that a child is always a child. The child begins 
as unspoiled to-day anyAvhere in Europe as he 
began in Merry England of the past, or in 
Lyonesse. It is the parents who change. One 
wonders then if there be any true parents left 
in the Germany which is prepared to breed 
children as a man breeds sheep. For that is 
the final horror, reserved for the modern state, 
into which not even Paganism fell. 

But, in that wonderful Hebrew dream, there 
is the vision of the child, just as there is the 
vision of the vicariously Suffering Servant. It 
must surely have been so bewilderingly unusual 

74 



THE HEART OF A CHILD 75 

that it passed unnoticed for many a day, passed 
unnoticed until the Child was born, the Child 
Who kept a child's heart Himself until the end, 
and Who called a little child and set him in the 
midst and said, "Of such is the kingdom of 
heaven." So Christ crowned the prophecy, 
albeit I suppose the circle that heard Him still 
did not understand. But Christendom came to 
understand it at last, never knowing how wise 
it was ; for a child never knows the marvel of 
himself until, having lost the precious thing, he 
looks back with tears. 

Mr. Chesterton has a happy phrase to 
illuminate this. He is writing of the Crusades, 
and reminds us that we speak sometimes of one 
as the Children's Crusade, whereas, in fact, all 
the crusades were children's crusades. Europe 
had the heart of a child when it still seemed 
simple and natural to love the Holy Places and 
to exchange common sense for adventure. 
Probably for this very reason the crusades, 
from the worldly point of view, were unsuccess- 
ful. The Saracen always staved them off. It 
was left for the modem operations of 1917 to 
take Jerusalem, thanks to the fact that these 
were not a crusade at all. King Richard's sol- 
diers fell on their knees at the sight of Jerusa- 
lem; King George's were not such — children. 
As I write, I do not know what they did in 
Jerusalem when they got there, but I could 
make a pretty certain guess. And as to thanks- 



76 STANDING BY 

giving, save that a silent party probably 
listened to sung Matins in the English church, 
Tommy must have thought mostly of getting a 
drink. However, even that is rather nice of 
him. The Germans would have marched the 
goose-step, and gone, functioning, to the 
Mosque of Omar. Tommy is at least a pagan 
child. He chucked his traps on the floor and 
wiped his forehead and called out of the depth 
of his heart for, if possible, a long beer. 

But Tommy is not typical of the middle-class 
England which sways our destinies and fills, so 
far as they are filled, our churches. That Eng- 
land may be fitly considered as represented by 
the Colonel with whom I discussed the situa- 
tion when the paper gave us the news of Gen- 
eral Allenby's success. 

*' Thanksgiving!" he said. ''Good heavens, 
I should think not ! "Why, it would offend our 
Mohammedan Allies." 

Indeed one noticed that what thanksgiving 
there was, was due to the fact that the Holy 
Places were at last delivered out of the hands 
of the Turks. "We said nothing in this century 
of the "Jews, Infidels and Hereticks," from 
whom the crusades also sought to save them. 
No wonder the Pope was awkwardly placed. 
He may well have considered the Holy Places 
to have been delivered out of the hands of the 
one but into the hands of the others. 

But I like that remark of the Colonel's. It 



THE HEART OF A CHILD 77 

is so gorgeously true, and it is just exactly what 
we should think about. For these are the two 
artificial things that are alien to the child-mind : 
to think about oneself, and to think about one 's 
policy. The modern world is for ever doing 
those two things. Its dull mediocrity, its ugli- 
ness, its terrible lack of humour, is due to the 
fact that these things are precisely the two 
things which are not worth thinking about. 
Man, by himself, is a horribly ignoble creature, 
which is the same as saying that he is a fallen 
creature, and he is only noble when his heart 
is set on God. A child's heart is set on God, 
for fairies and wonders and adventures all be- 
long to God. A child quests things for the sake 
of the joy of them, and their romance. He 
would really like the moon to play with, and he 
will play with it in imagination. Grown-up 
people do not care in the least about the moon, 
for if there are gold mines there they are not 
workable. In just the same way, the German 
wanted a place in the sun, using a figure of 
speech. The ruin of Belgium seemed to him to 
be the road. But every real child has a place 
there, and he attains it by sitting among the 
buttercups. 

In these days Eussia is giving us an object- 
lesson which is perhaps the most interesting 
thing now being taught in the school of the 
world. It seems to me an amazing thing that 
nobody appears to see it ; it is perhaps the final 



78 STANDING B\ 

judgment on our system of things. When the 
Eussian Eevolution came, English statesmen 
and the English Press hailed it with excited de- 
light, being blind leaders of the blind. There 
were always two possibilities abont that Revo- 
lution, and in point of fact either was bad for 
the Allies, although for different reasons. 
Either the Revolution was being managed by a 
set of men who might be either fanatics or 
scoundrels, or else the Revolution was manag- 
ing itself. In the first case the result was bound 
anyway to be bad. There was never the faintest 
chance that the little group, with their system 
of committees, would make unwieldy Russia an 
efficient war weapon — not the faintest. They 
had everything against them, even at the best. 
Machinery for the government of an Empire 
like the Russian takes experts to build and 
decades or centuries to establish itself, and 
these men were not experts and had no time. 
They were, moreover, exposed to more tempta- 
tions than mortal men could possibly weather — 
temptations of office, of fanaticism, of intrigue ; 
temptations to jealousy and from traitors. Had 
they been sincere, only a miracle could have 
saved Russia for the Allied Cause; and it was 
not very likely that they would have been sin- 
cere. We should have said at once, "This is no 
time for revolutions; this is no time for com- 
mittees; this is a time for which Democracy is 
not yet ready. You must do what we are doing: 



THE HEART OF A CHILD 79 

you irnist sacrifice your likes and dislikes, your 
ideals and your humanity, and blot out this 
Prussian madness first." And all we did was 
to shriek the old platitudes, as if the river of 
blood had never burst out of the mountain of 
our mockery of civilisation to drain to the sea. 

If, however, the Eevolution were managing 
itself — as I believe — it was so infinitely pathetic 
that it was a matter for tears. We were about 
to witness another children's crusade. That 
crusade had been the tender faithful protest of 
children against the Devil and his world. Little 
children, knowing only that they loved Jesus 
and believed in God, had arisen to say, *'We 
will go in weakness to take this thing we love, 
and the Father Who sees us will pity our sim- 
plicity and save us by a miracle." God is good, 
the children said; God is stronger than the 
Devil; we do love Jesus; that is enough: Let 
us go! And I suppose the Devil and the 
Saracen laughed, and the children's crusade, 
such of it as survived the journey, recruited 
the harems of the Turk and the ranks of the 
Janissaries. 

Now Russia is just like that. The Russian 
peasants are children. They have the child 
heart of love and faith and simplicity. They 
do not think about policies nor about them- 
selves. The War brought them up against the 
negation of all they held dear. Its awful 
tragedy swept over Russia as it swept over the 



80 STANDING BY 

rest of Europe, and blindly, like children, 
Russia went to the slaughter. They could not 
understand why peace and simple life should 
be destroyed. The powers that gripped them 
and flung them into hell, and devastated tens 
of thousands of homes, and brought starvation 
and lengthened out grim days into unending 
years, beggared their imagination. They 
looked round, wide-eyed and dumb, like suifer- 
ing children. And a voice ran through the 
land : God is good, children ; He sees ; take the 
peace and the simple freedom that you want. 
March to the holy places, for which man was 
made, with bare hands, and the German bayo- 
nets will be stayed by the power of God. 

I read it as the most pathetic happening in 
modern history. That great mob of children 
awoke out of the stupor of pain and looked 
round. Why, they seem.ed to say, do you fight, 
you nations'? We don't hate; why should men 
hate each other? We don't want riches; we 
only want, like the rest of the world, sufficiency 
and the simple life of man with his mate and 
his children. Come now, throw down your 
arms! Divide things up — there is plenty for 
all. Let us forgive and forget, and live like 
men, not like beasts. 

Poor children's crusade! God may be 
stronger than bayonets, but He does not turn 
them into butter if children walk up against 
them. The children's crusade found itself lost 



THE HEART OF A CHILD 81 

in the maze of policies and conventions and 
horrors of which modern life is fabricated. 
They tried to push a way through. The wolves 
fell on them, and the blood began to run through 
Eussia as never before. God knows when that 
hideous river will cease to run. 

There is exactly this spirit in the rank and 
file of our own Army, only our children are of 
curiously different stuff. You have only to 
wander round a battalion in the trenches or in 
the rear to see it. Our Tonmiies damn a war 
they cannot understand. The scheme of 
things is an insane mystery to them. They 
thought the Kaiser was off his head and the 
German nation a race of slaves (thanks to the 
Press) until they met the Germans. Now we 
laugh at the Kaiser rather than damn him. 
One man, however mad, could not have been 
responsible for all this. Some people blame 
the politicians, but most regard these as part 
of a mad muddle which is itself responsible. 
Tommy loves England because it is his home 
where his wife and kiddies are, and decent 
beer, and Bank Holidays; he calls it Blighty 
because it is a mad place where all these im- 
portant things exist, but do not seem to count 
in the working scheme of things. One is al- 
ways expecting Tommy to turn round and say, 
''Look 'ere, chuck it. I'm going back to me 
ole woman." 

But is the dream of that old Hebrew prophet 



82 STANDING BY 

ever going to come true? One asks that in 
France again and again — in the mess, when the 
talk comes round as it is ever doing to ''After 
the War," and in one's heart as one hears the 
men talk in hospital, train, and camp. Will 
these men, dissatisfied as they are, return to 
England afterwards to insist on a saner, hap- 
pier England, to seize that fellowship and peace 
for which man w^as made? 

Well, I am certain that the answer turns on 
one thing and one thing only. After the War, 
men will attempt to realise their ideals;, but 
what are their ideals? And then one is up 
against the tragedy. Your average German 
had, honestly, ideals for Germany and the Ger- 
man flag. He wanted Empire — the average 
German wanted it. The average Tommy does 
not care two straws for Empire. If what he 
wants can only be obtained through Empire, 
then he will want Empire, but he does not think, 
to-day, that they have got anything to do with 
it. Jingoism, as far as the men are concerned, 
is as dead as a door-nail. Your average Anzac, 
for example, came in because England was 
threatened and because he liked the adventure ; 
very few came in, against their likes and emo- 
tions, because they honestly thought the repub- 
lics of Australia and Canada were threatened, 
however much it is true that they were threat- 
ened. It is hard to realise a thing like that in 
the Colonies^ much harder than people would 



THE HEART OF A CHILD 83 

have us believe. But these men did not come 
in because they wanted to see more land under 
the Union Jack, or because they care a pin for 
Serbia and Belgium, or because the fact of Em- 
pire stirs them as it stirred Ealeigh and Drake 
and Clive. We are past all that. What Tom- 
my wants is his wife, his home, his Saturday 
afternoon and Bank Holiday, his beer and his 
kiddies. Unluckily he is a bit dazzled by the 
general increase of wealth. As his employer, 
who used to live next door to the business and 
walk the streets, now has a country mansion 
and a couple of cars, so he wants cinemas, and 
finery, and more sport. But the shine has gone 
out of his eyes for a little. If it does not re- 
turn to blind him, he will have those simple 
tilings of life, irrespective of policies and 
diplomacy and royalties and party government 
and every other thing that stands, or seems to 
him to stand, in his way. And all good luck to 
him, I say. 

That, then, is the child-heart in a way. We 
have it among us more than ever to-day. But 
are the lion and the wolf tame enough for the 
child to lead? It is not only the Kaiser, it is 
human nature that is the beast. Labour lead- 
ers can grasp at those bubbles men call national 
rights and popular government, and lose their 
heads seeking the mirage, and develop into 
tyrants, as easily as kings — perhaps more 
easily. Or again the millionaire is a thousand 



84 STANDING BY 

times more the foe of liberty, the enemy of the 
child, than the peer or the squire. And the 
only remedy is to tame them, to change their 
hearts. It is no remedy to blot them out, for 
they will only spring up again ; nor, if we blot 
out our generation of the wild beasts, will the 
next remember the lesson. 

I wonder what I have been writing. I sup- 
pose some people would call it Anarchy, and 
others Socialism, and so on through the list of 
names that deceive us all. But it is my opinion 
that I have simply been writing about Chris- 
tianity. 



X 

MICHAEL AND AGNESI 

THEY were discussing stories of valour 
the other night in mess, and I had 
a contribution to make. Thinking it 
over, I feel it might well be included in a book 
on what one has seen Standing By the Army 
in France. It will come best as a story, pure 
and simple. 

• • :•) ^^i ■•. • • 

Michael was eating porridge with enjoy- 
ment. It was not a pretty sight from our point 
of view, because when a native eats with enjoy- 
ment he is less particular than ever about 
spilling the food around and smearing it upon 
his face. But his wife probably thought other- 
wise, and in my own mind I am inclined to think 
that she was right. He was so lithe and well 
knit; and as he crouched beside the porridge- 
pot over the fire, the new sunlight just reach- 
ing him over the great shadow cast by the high 
reed fence, he looked what he was, a fine ani- 
mal. And she, presumably, had every reason 
to believe, even then, that he had a fine spirit 
also. 

85 



86 STANDING BY 

When he had finished, he got up and stretched 
himself, finally stalking out of the Lehhotla, 
bending to pass the low doorway with native 
grace. Outside the thin smoke-wreaths rose 
from a score of huts around, and the country 
lay, fresh in the spring green, before him. 
From where he stood you could see across fifty 
miles of country to the mountains of the ' * Con- 
quered Territory, ' ' and the view was very good. 
Ten miles away, however, trees on what looked 
to be, at that distance, a low ridge marked the 
Camp. Michael stared at it, and made up his 
mind. I do not think he had any reason at all 
in his head, but in that second his die was cast. 
"I go to the Camp," he called out to his wife. 

*'Eh," she answered laconically, and he went. 
They were never a talkative pair. 

His road ran uphill and down to spruits, and 
through several villages, and past a couple of 
stores. He walked with a swinging gait that 
did not seem fast, but which in reality quickly 
covered the ground. When the road wound 
down to cross a stream deep in a rocky val- 
ley, he would leave it, and scramble do^\Ti the 
rocks, cross, scramble up again, and so save per- 
haps a mile. So at lengi;h he was over the big 
river fairly full with the spring rains, and up 
on the veld of the reserve. Past the red-roofed 
hospital his road climbed, with the vlei beyond 
it on the left and the doctor's garden on the 
right. Past church and rectory, too, up to the 



MICHAEL AND AGNESI 87 

big store at the top of the street. But he did 
not stay there : Seanamarena was his mark. So 
he skirted the loopholed tower of the Gun War 
that now marks the gaol, and squatted on the 
stoep of the big trader's store. 

It is almost always busy and interesting (if 
you are intelligent enough to be interested) 
there. Strings of horses are unloading who 
have come tied tail to tail over the great moun- 
tains laden with wool or wheat, and you can dis- 
cuss their value, and hear the details of the 
journey and the news of Beyond. Then there 
are beasts to appraise, and the Camp folk to 
greet, and a few white men to stare at. You 
hear all the news, and not merely the news, but 
the news chewed upon by others and served up 
to fit the chewer's opinion of it. You then have 
the delightful task of making what you can out 
of it yourself, and finally of passing it on gar- 
bled in your own way. This was the way of the 
world before newspapers were, and it is a good 
way. It saves paper and ink, it does not per- 
petuate infamies, and it offers a liberal edu- 
cation without expense and with a good deal of 
pleasure. Now I think of it, it was very much 
thus that Oxford and Cambridge began. 

In this place and manner, then, Michael heard 
the news. It ran, I suspect, somewhat to the 
effect — the Germans were beating the English, 
and the King therefore required more men. 

This, at much length, was discussed over and 



88 STANDING BY 

over again, the conversation getting more 
wildly original and problematical at every turn. 
Micliael was a somewhat silent person, and lie 
listened and said little. By the time the in- 
formal pitso had decided that there were no 
English soldiers left and that the King was now 
about to fall back upon the finest fighting men 
in his dominions (to wit, the Basuto), but was 
rather ashamed to say so straight out, Michael 
had made up his mind. 

"Fools," he said. "I can tell you the truth 
of these things. What the Government says is 
true. Do white men work down in the mines? 
No. Why? Because there are none? No. Be- 
cause they cannot? No. Why, then? Why, 
because they have much other business which 
grows every day on top. So it is in this war. 
The great King is eating up his enemies. His 
soldiers spread over the land like locusts. 
Therefore he wants us to work at unloading his 
ships, as the news says. Should soldiers un- 
load ships? It is a good work, and one would 
see many strange things. Also, there is good 
pay. I shall go myself." 

That, I believe, was the substance of it. His 
audience were amazed that anyone should be- 
lieve such a stupendous theory as the simple 
one set out by the Government, but Michael be- 
lieved it. He walked straight away from them 
to the magistrate's office, who confirmed his 
opinion, and he met his padre outside in the 



MICHAEL AND AGNESI 89 

street, who did the same. True, he did not en- 
list that day; but his mind was made up. He 
set off home. At dusk he left the road and 
crossed the grass to his hut, stooped, and en- 
tered the enclosure. 

''Greeting, Agnesi," he said. *'I go to 
France." 

I am writing all this because some people will 
not believe that there are any simple natives 
left in Africa, especially Christian natives, but 
there are. The boys went to France for scores 
of reasons, as I shall hope to show, but some 
went for the simplest of all possible reasons — 
namely, the reason the Government gave; 
Michael was one. Agnesi, who gave him so 
readily, was simple too. Certainly, as I know, 
she asked who should gather in the harvest, and 
reminded her husband that her baby would 
shortly come ; but the answers to her riddles she 
knew before she asked. Their land was all but 
communal in the family, and the family would 
look after it and her, and the child. She saw 
nothing heroic or loyal in her decision, but the 
loyalty was there all right. The old father, 
abler at expression, put it into words for her: 
* ' I, " said he, ' ' fought for the Government in the 
Gun War. The Government has done well by 
us on the whole. Now the great King calls for 
his men, and Michael and the rest should go.'' 

"Eh," she said again, and pulled her blanket 
around her. 



90 STANDING BY 

Michael departed in due time for EoselDant 
Camp, Cape To\vn. He had travelled by train 
to the mines of the Gold City, but never so far 
as this, and the journey was full of strange 
sights and sounds. Also, Eosebank was a new 
experience. He learned the elements of drill, 
and liked it. He fed better than he had ever 
done before, and liked that. He was pretty 
strictly compounded and rather cramped on 
board ship, but he was a simple soul, and al- 
though he did not know it, discipline was stif- 
fening and refining him. He earned a reputa- 
tion for stolidity, but it was really something 
else. That something showed itself in the way 
he unwrapped his Prayer Book from its hand- 
kerchief every night and stood in the ring on the 
well-deck — whether the Prayer Book was used 
publicly or not. And all these things combined 
carried him through the supreme crisis of his 
short life, with others of his fellows, in a way 
of which his people should be as proud as we 
of the Birkenhead. 

The Mende stood out to cross the Channel at 
dawn on the last stage of that journey from the 
far Maluti village. She was full of boys, her 
troop-decks packed, her officers very hopeful 
of the landing at long last. But the heavy, sul- 
len seas about her were very cold. And then 
the Channel fog enveloped them, and there was 
a crash and a jar, and she heeled over ever so 
slightly and lay like a log. I picture it that 



MICHAEL AND AGNESI 91 

Michael was below, in the crowd. Only dimly, 
perhaps, he and the others realised the dan- 
ger, but the so short training and the hidden 
grit told, and there was none of that rush which 
had been feared. They tramped up on deck in 
their heavy boots and unlovely blue uniforms 
and lifebelts, and formed up as on parade. The 
swish of the sea, the shriek of the siren, the 
voices of officers, were heard, but the boys were 
silent, except to call now and again to mates to 
ask if their particular friends were there. 
Michael stood with difSculty on the sloping 
deck, now shaken a step forward as the ship 
rolled, now dressing back to the line as he had 
been taught. He watched the efforts made to 
get out the boats, and must have wondered how 
they would all get aboard. It was chill; he 
shivered slightly ; surely he saw again the cheer- 
ful fire and the warm sunlight ; surely the Lek- 
hotla at home. Agnesi would have her baby, 
perhaps, by now; maybe it was at her breast 
this moment. But the officer is speaking. 

"Boys," he called, ''at the word of command 
march forward and jump overboard. Your 
belts will keep you up; don't fear. Then the 
boats around will pick you up in the water. 
Are you ready? March!" 

It is easy to write heroics, but I am not 
ashamed to do so here. That steady jump of 
those black boys ought to still the slander in 
more white throats than it does, and at least 



92 STANDING BY 

for me I am not ashamed to say that I honour 
the race that did it. And in that cold water the 
warm African blood of six hundred boys of the 
King's black people chilled for ever. 

And Agnesi? What I have to set down is 
simply true. I do not offer to account for it, 
and I marvel at it with the rest. I would not 
have thought that even a Mission girl had it in 
her. But this is what happened. 

It was the padre who had to take her the news 
— the news of the death of the one which meant 
more to her than any of the rumours spy and 
rebel were circulating among the kraals. He 
rode up one morning, and she saw him come, 
and went out, baby in arms, to the door of the 
house to welcome him. He threw his reins over 
his beast's head, and walked up slowly, pon- 
dering words. They met, and she held out her 
hand, and he took it and retained it. She may 
have guessed, but she said nothing, native-wise. 
And he was clever enough not to try and bolster 
up the news. 

*'Agnesi," he said, ** Michael is dead, and I 
have come to tell you." 

He told her the story, standing so, and at the 
last she looked down at the boy. '* Father," 
she said slowly, ^'I am glad that he died in the 
King's waters/' And without a tear she 
turned from him and passed into the dark hut 
and sat down and hid her face. 

As I have said, that is true. I cannot account 



MICHAEL AND AGNESI 93 

for it, but I have much joy of Michael and Ag- 
nesi. Black folk — but not a soldier in the 
King's great armies could have died better than 
he, and not a mother of sea-girt England could 
have answered more nobly than she. And the 
nation that produced them will write its story 
yet in the record of the peoples. 



XI 
MODERN UGLINESS 

IT has been my personal happiness, ever 
since I was able to decide my work for 
myself, to live in veritable earthly para- 
dises. I remember a clergyman from the slums 
of a midland city, taking tea with me, for ex- 
ample, on the verandah of a clergy house on the 
East Coast of Africa. From where we sat a 
great bay lay spread out below us — a bay to 
rival Naples at its best. The still water was 
shot through with colours, the sky was a cloud- 
less blue, the beach glistened white with coral 
dust, the tall feathery palm trees fringed it just 
above low cliffs of dark grey coral rock, the 
bush beneath them was brightest green, except 
where it was starred with the orange or crim- 
son or white of tropical flowers. Inland the 
brown stems of the coco-nuts made shady aisles 
of the paths, and great masses of scarlet lilies 
flamed beneath them; while in the distance a 
long white building of Arabic architecture sug- 
gested an enchanted palace. Great lazy birds 
floated wide-winged along the marge of the sea, 
and their calling came up to us as from a great 

94 



MODERN UGLINESS 95 

distance. Twinkling lizards flashed in and out 
of the cool white stones of the verandah, and 
the scent of oleanders drifted up like incense. 
My friend sat very silent for a long while. Then 
he gave a half-sigh and said whimsically: ''I 
am glad I don't live here; I should never want 
heaven ! ' ' 

But I am not sure that Basutoland is not 
more lovely still in its own way. To come down 
through the village at the time of sunset; to 
walk along between the huts with their brown 
mud walls, their darker roofs, their grey-green 
aloe fences ; to see the clustering blue-gums and 
firs of the lower camp, with the white road run- 
ning down to the great plain, and the solemn, 
silent mountains all flushed with purple and 
gold beyond; and to see it all through a dif- 
fused golden light, with the blue smoke-wreaths 
rising on the air, and the little cheerful human 
sounds sounding all around — could anything be 
fairer? Or, nearer the Range, one will come 
to a village in the spring, the brown huts peep- 
ing out of a sea of peach blossom itself kept in 
as it were by the aloe fence, with the slow-mov- 
ing beasts moving in yellow dust to the grey- 
stone cattle kraals. Or again, one will rein in 
one's horse in the fastnesses of the Drakens- 
berg, and see the untrodden valley winding far 
below, the water foaming over the rocks in the 
sun, the few trees lovely in their scarcity, the 
great cliffs towering up on each side, the grassy 



96 STANDING BY 

banks rich with flowers, the blue sky dappled 
with fleecy driven clouds, the while the air is 
musical with the tinkle of falling water from a 
hundred tiny rivulets. It is impossible to do 
it justice. Few pictures can stand for the per- 
petual panorama of beauty. No raptures over 
spring or summer suffice when even a burnt-out 
autumn or a winter, with the lands brown be- 
neath the plough, has its own unsurpassable 
beauty. 

It is all this, then, that makes the incredible 
ugliness of modern civilisation so fearful and 
awful a thing to see. On and off for some 
months now, I have been living on the outskirts 
of Havre, and I have sometimes thought that 
there must be more beauty in the flames of hell. 
For miles around there stretches a hideous wil- 
derness of railway lines, dumps, docks, and 
waste places scattered with refuse, old scrap- 
iron, and filth. The camp, like many about, 
was once the swampy mud-flats of the Seine 
mouth. Cinders have been collected in vast 
quantities, tar and sand have been freely used, 
the most incredibly ugly utilitarian huts of wood 
and iron erected, and so the camps have been 
made. Any few bushes that once grew here 
have been long since rooted up. Except for 
sea-birds and for rats, there is no wild life at 
all. A hundred factory chimneys belch out 
smuts every day; railway engines add their 
quota to the filth; our own lesser incinerators 



MODERN UGLINESS 97 

and fires shower their blacks upon ns. The very 
sunlight is dirty. Wlien it rains, one wades 
through leagues of mud, and not clean earthy 
mud, but civilised ghastly mud that hides filth. 
Every form of every building is hideous, and, 
except where the buildings are those of Govern- 
ment, practically all the houses are in more or 
less decay. 

Nor can you excuse it by saying that it is one 
feature of the War. It is not. The town it- 
self is just as awful in its way. The ram- 
shackle, filthy tramcars; the mud be-splashed 
walls and houses ; the staring but still dirty tidi- 
ness of villa houses; the straight, unimagina- 
tive streets of the new city ; the garments of the 
people — from start to finish it is all hideous. 
Not that Havre is worse than other places, and 
I admit its moments of transformation under 
an early sun or full moon. But on the whole 
one wanders about stricken dumb with the 
thought of this garment of ugliness that is be- 
ing stretched across the beautiful world. Every 
day adds to it, every invention makes it worse 
and extends it. Every social change increases 
the cities and blackens the country. 

All this is, of course, commonplace ; but what 
strikes an observer fresh from the clean loveli- 
ness of the world, is that we ourselves are get- 
ting ugly. One can live in hideousness if one's 
soul pines away for the beautiful ; but the souls 
of modern men are not pining for the beauti- 



08 STANDING BY 

ful. That lovable person, Tommy, is indiffer- 
ent to it ; indeed he rather likes it. I remember 
taking a crowd of city Boy Scouts out for a 
week on to the moors, and that they were more 
or less miserable until they discovered a fried 
fish shop in the purlieus of the nearest big vil- 
lage. And individuals that we rank as the class 
above these are no better. Suburban houses, 
even the houses we build for ourselves in the 
country, together with all the litter of modem 
civilisation, are nearly as ugly too. Down here 
in Havre, people who could get elsewhere come 
to live among us. There are little children be- 
ing bom in this damned wilderness of rusty 
tram-lines, stagnant water, sooty, crumbling, 
pigsty houses, noise and smoke, because their 
parents like it ! The thought of it can become 
a kind of nightmare. There are children grow- 
ing up here who will come to regard with per- 
fect complacency these muddy ugly streets, who 
will end by being unhappy away from them, and 
whose chief idea of beauty will be the dresses 
of the girls at the music-hall or perhaps the the- 
atrical moonlight or sunset of a cinema. And 
not only will they not want anything else : they 
would be unhappy in my paradise. 

It surely would be conceit, therefore, to argue 
in favour of mj'" paradise as compared with 
theirs, if it were not for certain tests. The 
things upon which people set their minds are 
surely open to reasonable comparison. The 



MODERN UGLINESS 99 

terrible thing, then, about our democracies is 
that the mind of the freed people is set on such 
sordid things, and that with the increase of free- 
dom they seem to grow worse. I remember a 
discontented rich manufacturer who said, ' ' Yes, 
business is doing well, but I don't know when 
we are going to stop. I have to have a car to 
keep pace with my fellows and the growth of 
trade, but when my workpeople see me in my 
car they go home and agitate for another shill- 
ing to spend on a cinema. ' ' That, I think, is a 
perfectly natural thing. I do not blame the 
workpeople : I should probably agitate for two 
shillings if I were one. But the terrible thing 
is that people should agitate for anything in or- 
der to see more of the cinema, as terrible as 
that any employer should conceive himself as 
forced to peddle round in an ever-increasing 
fever at the bidding of some imaginary dirty 
trade, like a squirrel in a cage. 

Nobody is satisfied, so far as I can see, with 
simple things — sufficiency, and their home. 
Nevertheless, the contented man, to whom these 
things are an ideal, can get them even now, and 
get them beautiful. He will insist on having 
them beautiful. There was an age once in Eu- 
rope when people were like this, when there 
was, in Mr. Chesterton's vivid phrase, "a name- 
less but universal artistic touch in the moulding 
of the very tools of life. ' ' Here and there, even 
in such a town as this, one can see the relics of 



100 STANDING BY 

those days. On one of the quays here there is 
an old house which I always stop to look at in 
passing. It is sandwiched between two modern 
tall rectangular buildings, with rusty straight 
iron bars as their main note. I do not know 
what function the bars play, but like so many 
French things, naked, unlovely, dull-painted 
metal seems most in evidence. But the old 
house in between is so different. It has great 
wooden beams dividing its floors, and ancient 
tiles, gables, and a roof of mystery. There are 
windows which plainly light queer irregular 
rooms, each with its own fascination, and each 
with its own view of the crowded wharf. Who- 
ever built that house, built it bit by bit as he 
loved to have it. It was added to, and added to, 
by generations whose eyes were set on their 
home within it. Now, of course, no one cares 
any longer. Walking with a brother officer the 
other day, I stopped and drew his attention to 
it. He looked at it critically. **How like the 
French!" he said. '^It will fall and kill some- 
body some day. Why doesn't somebody pull 
the miserable thing down?" I said absolutely 
nothing: what could one say? 

I am not quite fool enough to argue that peo- 
ple should live in insanitary houses liable to 
fall down at any time, but I am weeping over 
the change in ideal. One does not know what 
people do live for nowadays. It is not money, 
for people are not content with money, how- 



MODERN UGLINESS 101 

ever much they have. It is not pleasure ex- 
actly, for people are never content only with 
pleasure. It is not adventure, for now that it 
is more easy to adventure than ever before, it 
is becoming a kind of forgotten art. People 
seem to live in a vain discontent which has 
blinded their eyes and choked their souls, out 
of which even the War cannot arouse them, and 
which has no goal and no satisfaction. In the 
pursuit of it, the appreciation of beauty has 
been lost, and hence our modern ugliness. 

Listening to talk of these things, one finds 
oneself wandering in a vicious circle. The en- 
vironment and conditions of the mass of Euro- 
peans are such that they have no chance, we are 
told ; but, on the other hand, when they are given 
the chance, they throw it away. France is no 
better than England, indeed in some ways it is 
worse: even morality has become ugly. But 
France has been the freest democracy in Eu- 
rope for generations; wealth has been more 
equally distributed here than anywhere; the 
French have been endowed with more soul to 
work upon than most. Perhaps they have 
shown us the noblest dying in Europe, but it 
can hardly be said that they have shown us the 
noblest living. If socialism came to-morrow, I 
doubt if there would be any saner living on the 
part of the people. Men are after socialism 
to-day, not because they wish to live more 
sanely, but because they wish other people not 



102 STANDING BY 

to live so luxuriously. I have never noted that 
socialists have happier, simpler, more beauti- 
ful homes than other people, that socialists love 
beauty more than the rest. 

But we began with Africa, and Africa throws 
a good deal of light on these things, or so it 
seems to me. The only reason why I write of 
them is because I conceive that Europe in the 
light of Africa is a somewhat novel point of 
view. And one collects a body of evidence from 
Africa and Africans on the subject. To begin 
with, one must admit that it is remarkably dis- 
concerting that natives from African paradises 
do not seem to object to European ugliness as 
I do. I have a boy whose home, inside and out, 
materially and morally, is a picture. He is in- 
telligent and friendly. But I have never been 
able to tempt him, however hard I try, into an 
expression of the disgust that I feel about this 
city. I am not sure that he even wants to re- 
turn to the paradise he has left. Why is that? 

Or again, on the spot, Africans rarely ap- 
preciate Africa. Most of the tribes have no 
name for the flowers and grasses, except such 
as are good for food or useful for other pur- 
poses; the rest they never notice. I have 
known one or two who would rein up to admire 
a view, one who even wrote verse about the sun- 
set, but even he seems to prefer to use a utili- 
tarian tin atrocity from the store rather than a 
lovely native piece of pottery. That pottery, 



MODERN UGLINESS 108 

like to Mr. Chesterton's tools of the Middle 
Ages in beauty, is rapidly disappearing as a 
craft. Why is this? 

On the other hand, your African, especially 
your decent Christian native who has not been 
too near civilisation, is often centred on the sim- 
ple things. Love of one's children, affection 
for one's plot of earth, interest in one's cattle, 
contentment with good food and sunshine, fear 
of and trust in God, these are still his. In con- 
sequence, I love the days when I can live all but 
as a native in a native village. I have one such 
in mind. I will arrive and talk pleasantly with 
the women while the boys see to my horse. The 
man and I will go to the kraal and lean on the 
grey stone wall smoking while the beasts come 
home, and each can be discussed. Then we ring 
the bell and step into the little church with the 
people and say simple prayers simply in com- 
mon. Then he and I will sit and w^atch the 
changing lights on the mountains while they 
cook the food, and I will eat it in my mud-hut 
off tin plates with one knife, fork, and spoon. 
And then I will go inside his reed fence and sit 
on a native stool by the dung fire and tell stories 
about the stars to a naked brown imp on my 
knee, or run out and play the moon game, which 
consists of wailing and crying that the moon is 
being eaten by the clouds, and dancing and sing- 
ing when she escapes. And then to bed in 
rough blankets and up with the dawn. 



104. STANDING BY 

But as I jog home over the veld I wonder, 
after all, for what man was made. To tame the 
lightning and bind the sunshine ; to search out 
every hidden thing, and drag it into the mael- 
strom of the ''world of becoming"; to drag 
down everything that is up, so that everything 
that is down may have its day — none of these 
things seem much to me. Eather to live as 
these Africans are living, only with increasing 
sense of enjoyment and faculty for praise, and 
to go out more eagerly than we came in with 
desire for the All-good, surely this is life. And 
to have helped others to that ideal, that is serv- 
ice. 

Our civilisation has one potency — it blinds. 
It blinds my Africans to the beauties of Africa 
and the ugliness of Europe. It glitters and 
charms and blinds them, even there, to their 
own riches. It blinds us to the meaning of life. 
It makes us think that to pull down the Hohen- 
zollerns or to set up the socialists is to live ; or 
that to face discomfort gallantly, to finish at 
twenty-five, and to do it under the conditions 
of hell, is to die. To many individuals this War 
has been all gain. I dread lest our victory 
should make that gain barren. I dread lest it 
should bolster up our modern civilisation, and 
spread its tentacles yet farther. But it may be 
that the guns will shatter more yet than mod- 
ern cities and ancient art, and we shall find our 
souls. 



XII 

VERSAILLES 

THERE is a chapter in Rupert Brookes* 
beautiful and vivacious Letters from 
America which liaunts one. He is 
speaking of the Rockies and of the great West, 
and he says they are ' ' wind-swept and empty. ' ' 
' ' You may lie awake all night and never feel the 
passing of evil presences, nor hear printless 
feet ; . . . there is nothing lurking in the heart 
of the shadows, and no human mystery in the 
colours; ... no ghosts of lovers in Canadian 
lanes." And he misses "the comfortable con- 
sciousness of friendly watchers under our Eng- 
lish sky." "For it is possible, at a pinch, to 
do without gods. But one misses the dead." 

I do not know the Rockies and I have very 
little desire to visit the West, but I feel that this 
is one of the truest things that ever poet wrote. 
For there is no doubt about the immortals in 
Europe. There is no doubt about them in many 
parts of Africa. The Malutis are wind-swept, 
bare, cruel. Up there, on one of the ribs of the 
world, one would expect to be alone. But one 
is not. Though people whose occupation has 

105 



106 STANDING BY 

left scant traces are gone, their ghosts remain. 
I have camped on empty terraces of the moun- 
tains and found them haunted ere the dawn, and 
haunted indefinably as though by poor spirits, 
who, as they had not character enough to stamp 
their mark upon the face of the world, so now 
give no other impression save that they are 
alive. 

But if ever the pressure of immortals rested 
on a place, it rests upon Versailles. It is not 
merely the vague pressure of the dead ; it is the 
enchantment of a definite age, the stamp of a 
civilisation. There is a challenge about Ver- 
sailles. A voice seems to cry through the gar- 
dens and down the glades and to echo silently 
along the great corridors — a Voice which will 
not let one go, and which compels, if not a bold 
answer, an uneasy retreat. A poet can dally 
with the spirits of the English countryside, but 
he cannot play with the spirit of Versailles. 
One can visit many a haunted spot deliberately 
in order to trifle with the melancholy, the 
pathos, the joy, or the beauty of the past, but 
I cannot conceive how anyone could so trifle 
where lingers yet the spirit of the golden age 
of Prance. I would go bravely if I were sure 
of our present. I did go reverently because I 
offered homage to that past. But I went tim- 
idly because, although I have a hope for the fu- 
ture, I am not sure ; and it may be that the scorn 
which that past age has of us, the sense of scorn 



VERSAILLES lOT 

which dominates there, will be awfully justified. 
The ghost of Versailles is the ghost of king- 
ship, and nothing lacks to it. You pass, an in- 
significant, tiny creature, through the great 
gates and courts, and, creeping round by a back 
door as if the central entrance were too great 
for our times to keep open, come out on the ter- 
races. The gardens stretch away before you 
like a challenge to Nature. She, unaided, can 
hardly offer such vistas, such swelling breasts 
of verdure, such shimmering, ordered pools. 
Her gods and goddesses, tamed in stone, serve 
this creation of monarchs, just as the spirit of 
Monarchy and not of them rules it. You, awed 
by it, reflect that this was done, not by the col- 
lective will of a people, but by the will of the 
King, embodied certainly in two or three of his 
line, but still of the King, for the King never 
dies. You enter the vast galleries, and pass 
from room to room towards the inner sanctuary 
where the King slept; or you enter — and it is 
not an anti-climax — the Musee des Voitures, and 
see how the King went abroad. Those trumpet- 
ing angels, that uplifted crown, that rich and 
gilded carving, bespeak the insolence of maj- 
esty. You marvel that a man should have sat 
there, should have dared to shoulder the im- 
putation of it all. And yet Versailles can teach 
you that the King was a man, his consort but a 
woman. The Pare du Petit Trianon spells that. 
One visits La Maison du Seigneur, the Homeau, 



108 STANDING BY 

the Laiterie. So great did kingship feel itself, 
that it conceived it could afford to play. Marie 
Antoinette went singing down those paths, 
swinging her sun-bonnet by its ribands, and 
picking wild flowers in the grass. Ah! Marie 
Antoinette; perhaps kingship could not afford 
to play. If this be so, here is the vulnerable 
spot. If the King could not permit himself to 
play, that means that he had continually to pose, 
to make believe. Then kingship were a sham. 
Maybe it was because the Queen of that tragedy 
so fiercely believed the opposite that she was 
willing to put it to the final test. Then were she 
truly martyr, for she died for her faith. I like 
at least to think how well she passed the trial 
of her royalty by death. What fools the people 
were ! They might have known that kings had 
long learnt to die kingly. Modem democracies 
are infinitely wise ; they turn their kings out to 
play. If I were a king who believed in king- 
ship, I would not risk that ; I would force their 
hand and make them kill me. 

One triumph Versailles has as yet, without 
the shadow of a doubt. Democracy cannot use 
it. Democracy can no more use Versailles than 
Protestantism can use a Gothic cathedral. Both 
challenge us with complete success, and this is 
a very disquieting thing. At Versailles the 
empty galleries abase one, and one's guide un- 
utterably humiliates. A mean figure, he paws 
these sacred things about, and ruthlessly ex- 



VERSAILLES 109 

poses the ignominious pettiness of modernity by 
supposing that such monuments need such 
words. He cannot distinguish between the 
great and the little, the noble and the base. As 
in an English cathedral you will be told in a 
breath some travesty of an aphorism about the 
sublimity of the architecture and the cost of the 
electric lighting, so at Versailles, in a royal 
anteroom, you will have to listen to the esti- 
mated value of the pictures. In France, even 
more than in England, he will go on to claim, 
by tone and manner, the equality of modern 
citizenship, wherein he would be entirely within 
his rights did he not abjure them when he looks 
for a tip at the gate. Yet how incontestably 
contemptible is the point of view for which that 
action stands, and in which one acquiesces. To 
have been introduced to the spirit of Versailles 
is worth a great largesse or grave and honour- 
able thanks. Our century estimates it at a franc 
a head, unless one arrives in an automobile. 

I feel that Democracy might do many things 
with Versailles. It might, for example, burn 
it with due ceremony, because it stood for awful 
tyranny, and tyranny is past. It might, on the 
other hand, offer it as a residence to the Pope as 
the one sovereign left on earth who believes in 
a sovereignty that one can still respect even if 
one does not believe in it. The Cardinal Arch- 
bishop of Paris might reside there at the public 
expense. That would please half France and 



110 STANDING BY 

be a graceful act. But Democracy, as we know 
it to-day, can do neither. It is too miserly for 
the first, and too weak for the second. So it 
takes the other course, and turns this mauso- 
leum of that kingship, through faith in which 
men made the very name of France, into a mu- 
seum. It prints and sells picture postcards of 
it. I have the packet before me as I write. The 
picture of Les Bains d'Apollon has a careful 
foreground of an amateur photographer, in a 
straw hat and frock coat, about to snapshot a 
party of his friends with binoculars and a 
luncheon basket, and that of Le Bassin de La- 
tone is designed to advertise the attraction of 
tourists to the place. 

One of the signals that the ideals towards 
which our modern hope extends, have finally 
triumphed, will be the reverence, that the future 
may see, with which such a place as this will be 
kept. When the people are conscious of the 
inherent dignity of humanity, there will, in the 
first place, be no need for police, waste-paper 
baskets, tickets of admission, and guides. 
Frenchmen will bid their sons remember that 
the spirits of those who helped France to con- 
tribute to the faith and triumph of the new 
world linger here. They will bid them remem- 
ber how magnificently conceived a theory was 
staged within these bounds, how nearly it suc- 
ceeded, how tragically it lost. They will come 
to reflect among these gardens upon the prog- 



VERSAILLES 111 

ress of liuman aspiration and endeavour, and 
that to have served an ideal nobly is better than 
to have no ideal to serve. They will come to 
reverence here, remembering that Almighty 
God Himself set higher than those of angels 
the loves and tears of men. An honourable 
service will keep Versailles. The nations will 
esteem as highly as any other human depart- 
ment of social employment that which protects 
the haunt of the human mystery of the past. 
Maybe the immortals will be '^ friendly watch- 
ers ' ' then. 

For one realises that what underlay kingship 
was a national faith. Without this realisation 
the thing is incredible. He was, we say, but a 
man who wore the crown, but the peoples in the 
days gone by did not believe that. Versailles 
bids us reflect how colossal was the might of 
these bygone kings, and how broad-based their 
power, since it stood upon the people's faith. 
Versailles cost I know not how many millions 
of gold pieces, how many tens of thousands of 
lives. That majesty might have fitting abode 
and express its dreams, the wise gave freely of 
their learning, the rich of their money, the poor 
of their labour. We conceive that there were 
those who grudged these, but their grudge was 
a feeble thing. It had no universal support ; it 
was not greater than the common faith. If it 
had been, it would sooner have displaced that 
faith ; it would never have stood by and watched 



112 STANDING BY 

the erecting of this palace ; for one of the amaz- 
ing truths hid in Versailles is the weakness of 
the King's person. He was less able than the 
majority of modem prime ministers, less 
wealthy than many millionaires, and controlled 
a smaller personal force than the Metropolitan 
Constabulary. Henry viii., on our side the 
water, would have been a very much limited 
personality as Henry Tudor, the village 
butcher; as King he was an unlimited despot. 
If a genius like Oliver Cromwell had chanced 
to live before the people 's faith in kingship was 
all but gone, he would have rivalled Augustus 
Caesar; and as for Napoleon, he would have 
equalled one of those semi-divine legendary 
monarchs of antiquity and might have ruled the 
world. The true founders of Versailles to-day 
— to be honest — would probably not have shoAvn 
enough personal talent to be elected to Parlia- 
ment. 

No; the fact was that the world believed in 
kings. It believed that their blood was blue, 
and that they went hedged about with divinity. 
The sacred oil gave them an unction from the 
Holy One. "God and I," says the Kaiser, but 
Caesar would have reversed the words, and 
Louis only not have done so out of conventional 
piety. For God was in heaven, but the King 
on earth, and in the King's ear He whispered 
and through the Iving's mouth He spoke. As 



VERSAILLES 113 

with the priest, his personal unworthiness did 
not much affect the value of his deeds, and, if 
they became intolerable, the man but not the 
King died. And this faith had elements of no- 
bility about it, for it proved that men believed 
that among them dwelt those for whom God 
Himself had need, and who were capable of 
carrying out in secular affairs on earth His Will 
as it is done in heaven. 

Now, as one wanders about Versailles, one 
feels that if the peoples wholly lose such faith, 
the world is lost indeed. It will be lost, I say, 
if we lose such faith about sovereignty. This 
which was believed about the sovereign monarch 
must have its counterpart in our faith about the 
sovereign people ; or we are undone. If we con- 
ceive no higher of men than that they are the 
highest of the beasts, if we frame our policies 
having breeding stocks in view, if we direct our 
energies solely towards an economic middle- 
class mediocrity of living — then Democracy is 
not merely doomed: it is damned. But if we 
feel that man is God's viceregent upon earth, 
that the divine has need of him, that God can 
whisper in his ear and speak through his mouth, 
that the .blood of man as man runs blue in his 
veins — then may we yet be saved. If the lode- 
star of Democracy is the development of the 
potentiality of the race, and not the coddling 
of the actuality of the individual;^ then Democ- 



114 STANDING BY 

racy is a cause which a man may serve as they 
of old served the Kjiig. And I can see the test 
of our faith. Our fathers housed their mon- 
arch in Versailles, for nothing less was fitting, 
and nothing less than a Versailles for the sov- 
ereign people will serve us either. 

There is a savour of familiarity about Ver- 
sailles for all its grandeur. Infinite pride and 
care marked out those broad walks and drew 
these mighty but still human rooms. But it 
seemed to me that the spirit of them was not 
so different from that which has haunted me 
before now as I walked down two-foot paths 
between sweet-scented beds, and entered a spot- 
less kitchen, clean and sweet and open to the 
sun. There are parlours in England which de- 
mand a courtesy no less than that demanded in 
the drawing-rooms of Versailles, and I have 
bowed in my soul before now^ to a labourer's 
wife as I would have done to Marie Antoinette. 
It is not the size of the kingdom that matters, 
nor the cost of the palace ; it is not the place of 
the queen, but the pride of the woman. There 
is a sovereignty in motherhood that is crowned 
more fitly than with gold, and kings have them- 
selves before now offered homage to monarchs 
who have carved out a kingdom but called it 
a home. But I wonder, turning the newspapers 
and listening to speeches in the places of as- 
sembly, if this is yet the faith of the peoples, 



VERSAILLES 116 

if they believe to-day in the divine right of 
kings, for I know that as Monarchy stood so 
long as and no longer than it rested upon that 
foundation, so Democracy has no hope of sov- 
ereignty in any lesser thing. 



XIII 
STREET GIRLS 

A PADRE is, of course, the last person 
who should know anything of this sub- 
ject, except enough to enable him to 
make veiled references in sermons; and cer- 
tainly he is the last person to write such things 
as I propose to do. But the fact remains for 
all that, and, thank God the War helps one to be 
honest. And therefore, since one cannot be in 
the B.E.F. in France and not see much of them, 
and since I cannot understand how one should 
see and yet not consider, I propose to write 
about the girls of the streets. 

To begin with, he would be an amazingly in- 
human person w^ho did not find something lov- 
able about them. A place like this can be about 
as drab and as depressing as possible. Ugli- 
ness is universal ; work is dull and monotonous ; 
the War is perpetually brooding over us; the 
majority bear some mark of it, though why say 
the majority, since all bear some mark in body 
or soul? Down town one goes for recreation, 
but there is little there. And one meets the 
girls in the streets, cheerful, human, gay, and 

116 



STREET GIRLS 117 

one smiles back involuntarily. It is all very- 
well to read the Ten Commandments and preach 
them; it is all very well to feel oneself impreg- 
nable within a fortress not of this building; but 
the padre who cannot see the attraction, and 
sympathise, seems to me an incredible creature. 

Personally they make me feel hotly indignant, 
rather tender, and very pitiful, which is a curi- 
ous mixture. I am afraid I cannot feel shocked ; 
one so soon gets past that ; and however a man 
can despise or jeer at them, I do not know. They 
are so human to begin with, indeed they are bits 
of naked humanity, and humanity is the most 
lovable thing on earth. There are, naturally, 
exceptions, but depraved does not seem the 
right word to use about these girls. I sup- 
pose to be depraved is to be vicious, to have 
taken a good thing and to have made it a bad 
thing, to have degraded something divine into 
something devilish ; and this is, of course, what 
is said about prostitution. But in these days, 
it does not seem to me the right thing to say. 
Nine men out of ten feel that to dismiss it at 
that misses the mark, and it is no use being a 
democrat on the one hand, and yet, on the other, 
despising the opinion of nine men out of ten. 

That is what one has got to face. This is the 
point of view that is becoming increasingly 
common, and which the War has done so much 
to advance, and it would not be so widespread 
if there were nothing in it. 



118 STANDING BY 

The position, as I understand it, is something 
of this sort. The street girl believes that sen- 
sual pleasure is on a kind of par with every 
other pleasure of men and women, only the 
greatest of them all. She finds it bound up in 
that strange composite bundle that we call hu- 
man nature. She is no longer interested in 
origins, though the society she represents, 
which condones her, would accept the Specta- 
tor's dictum that "there is no record of man's 
birth and childhood"; and she is merely inter- 
ested in the fact that even men who can live un- 
selfishly and die heroically find a craving here 
as great as the craving for food and refresh- 
ment. She proposes, therefore, to minister to 
that. She decks herself gaily. She learns, 
God knows how, continually to smile. And she 
goes out to do business in a hard world. 

Half our literature glosses over this fact. 
Perhaps one phase of the modern revolt is due 
to the circumstance that the theories of the 
moralists do not agree with the actualities of 
life. There is no man not moved by pitiful 
stories of the White Slave traffic, of drugged, 
deluded, and despairing girls, and of brutal and 
bestial agents, and lest it should be thought for 
a moment that any words here condone them or 
it, let me write at once how utterly damnable 
I hold all that to be. I would make it a capital 
offence. But in these streets, one is left de- 
fenceless. What can one say to a girl who has 



STREET GIRLS 119 

gone into the business of her own free will be- 
cause she likes it, or because she has a patri- 
otic affection for the saviours of her country, 
or because she wants rapidly to earn a marriage 
dot and become a mother of legitimate chil- 
dren? What can one say of a girl — and nine- 
tenths that I have met are so — who has a high 
standard of honour, who can be extraordinarily 
affectionate and generous, who is tender and 
comforting and womanly, whose picture men 
carry over their hearts into action though they 
know perfectly well what she is ? 

I know at least what I say: they make me 
feel chivalrous. They are feminine, in a day 
when feminine women are hard to seek ; plucky ; 
perhaps above all things plucky. They never 
know what they will meet ; they face the cold and 
wet so gaily; I know of so many instances of 
their kindheartedness ; and as I look at them, 
and still believe that a terrible fate overtakes 
them — sometimes the fate of the good books, 
always the fate of the inexorable laws of God 
— there is nothing I would not do to help them. 
As I know, this is dr^dful in a padre, and yet 
I wonder if it is right that it should be thought 
so. It seems to me that the eyes of Christ must 
have held something very different from dis- 
gust and horror as He looked upon the street 
girls of His day, or He would never have been 
called their Friend. 

Now the girls of the streets are, of course, a 



120 STANDING BY 

professional class — a class that exists in all 
countries, although it exists more easily and 
happily in some countries than in others, but the 
real problem of Christianity is not this class at 
all. What we have got to face is this : the point 
of view that I have indicated as that of the pro- 
fessional prostitute in France is rapidly becom- 
ing the point of view of vast numbers of civi- 
lised people. It strikes one forcibly out here 
that a great deal of sexual pleasure is afforded 
to men not by these girls but by ordinary and 
even by married women. Men have said to me 
again and again, ''It is hard to make a mis- 
take." It is hard. There are here, and I 
know some of them, women whose virtue (in 
the old language) is above question; but the 
great majority of the girls of the teashops, for 
example, from Adderley Street, Cape Town, to 
Havre and Dieppe, are as open to friendships 
as it is possible to be, and as often as not in- 
clude sexual relationship in them. I trust I 
shall not be assassinated for saying so. As for 
the men, they are frankly out for anything they 
can get, and they have no controlling discipline 
due to religion or social custom whatever. They 
are just eager individuals. And the women 
meet them more than half-way, married women 
and ordinary women with less cloak for their 
readiness than even the prostitute. 

Or again, numbers of civilised decent women 
no longer expect of men what our grandmothers 



STREET GIRLS 121 

expected. One woman of the world, a nurse 
of great experience with whom I got a chance 
for a real talk, told me that if her fiance went 
on leave to Paris she would not expect him to 
be what we used to call faithful, and that if mar- 
ried, she would grant to him, and expect her- 
self, absolute liberty. But she would never 
marry. She knew men too well: their petty 
jealousy, and that temperamentally one woman 
never could satisy them. It was hopeless to 
expect that she could. And I did not wholly 
disagree as I might have been expected to do. 
Once the inspiration, the aspiration, of religion 
is removed from a human life, I do not see how 
one can expect lesser things for ever by them- 
selves completely to hold and satisfy. That is 
only to plagiarise St. Augustin, who, after all, 
had been a man of the world before he was a 
saint. 

If these words are ever read, people may per- 
haps be indignant; but I cannot help it : it is so. 
We know it to be. For my part, this War has 
meant meeting with all sorts and conditions of 
men and women from Great Britain to Aus- 
tralia, from black through every shade to our 
own whitey-pink, and I doubt if one can over- 
estimate the break-up of the old standards. 
True, people all think that the birth of children 
should be legalised by State recognition of sex- 
ual union, but people also think that the State 
has no right of interference with their private 



122 STANDING BY 

liberty, and that it is its business to take any 
steps to increase the birth-rate. Easier divorce 
naturally falls under this heading, divorce laws 
which should finally make of marriage only a 
reasonably possible contract and not (as they 
say) an unreasonable, impossible union. And 
it seems to me that they are perfectly right 
from their point of view, for to them marriage 
has no superhuman sacramental sanction, and 
is merely a practical human arrangement for 
business purposes. One cannot deny that the 
Catholic Church did not run marriage on busi- 
ness lines, and that the modern non-Christian 
State should do so. 

What people no longer think — and this is 
what interests me — is that there is any super- 
human authority in the world with the right to 
touch their personal liberty, their likes and dis- 
likes. God no longer thunders on Sinai. The 
Sermon on the Mount was preached two thou- 
sand years ago. Both incidents are embodied 
in a discredited book, and the power behind the 
book is a phantom. You can say Boo ! and noth- 
ing happens, and so it can be only a goose. 

There are many inferences to be drawn from 
this, but I am concerned with one only here. 
It seems to me that the day has gone by in which 
we can act, and expect the State to act, as if we 
and it were dealing with churchmen and Chris- 
tians. When those two words ceased to be 
synonymous, the decay began. Now, happily 



STREET GIRLS 123 

or unhappily, we have come to the logical end. 
There is no divine authority, and ''man is the 
master of things." 

It is therefore perfectly useless to go on talk- 
ing about sin in quite the same way as before, 
to damn the girls of the streets as a class, to 
protest on the old lines against the trend of 
modern legislation, and so on. As a matter of 
fact, except in the abstract, this modern im- 
morality is no longer sin as sin to those who 
do it at all. An interesting parallel is offered 
us by the old-fashioned Protestant attitude 
towards the Roman Catholic who believed in 
Transubstantiation. It used to be called idol- 
atry, but it is clearly not that. Though the 
Host were only bread, the Roman Catholic did 
not worship bread as God. He does not believe 
that bread is there any longer, and even if he 
is mistaken, still all he worships is God. God 
Himself cannot be conceived as punishing a 
Breton peasant for idolatry because the peas- 
ant worships Him mistakenly, without fault of 
his own, believing Him to be where He is not, 
on the Protestant hypothesis. And it is the 
same in this case. Here is, for example, a girl 
who has become entirely removed, by the cir- 
cumstances of her environment and age, from 
any conception of divine restriction on a certain 
act; God Himself cannot punish her as if she 
had disobeyed what she knew to be His Com- 
mand. Maybe she ought to have known, but 



1«4 STANDING BY 

who can say? We at least should leave the 
judgment of that to God's mercy-seat. 

An amazing little incident came my way this 
Christmas. I went into Notre Dame in this 
town in the dusk, and there were few worship- 
pers. Up one aisle I saw many lights before 
the Crib, but I went up the other to a shrine that 
has only one small lamp before it in this par- 
ticular church, and which I thought would be 
deserted at the Christmas season. I did not 
notice anyone there, and I knelt to pray, and, 
motionless, could hardly myself even be seen. 
But in a few minutes I heard steps come up 
behind me, and a girl passed the end of my row 
of chairs, went in between the doors of the 
screen of the side-chapel, and knelt on the altar- 
step of the shrine. I hardly noticed her, until 
I was attracted by the sound of sobs. Then I 
looked up and saw, in the dim light, that her 
shoulders were shaking with emotion, and her 
whole body bent in her grief. A few minutes 
passed, and then I could stand it no more, and 
I went up, knelt beside her, and asked if I could 
help. She looked up, and, despite her tears, I 
recognised a girl who is often in a gaudy tav- 
ern of the place, an unrepentant Magdalene. 
I thought at once that here was penitence, and 
pressed her as kindly as I could to speak, mean- 
ing to persuade her to enter a confessional if 
I could. But when she spoke in a moment be- 
tween her sobs, I got a surprise. 



STREET GIRLS 125 

' ' One of my boys, one whom I liked so much, 
has been killed," she said. 

*'But why ever did you come here?" I ex- 
claimed in amazement. 

''Oh, it's so quiet and dark," she said, "and 
I love this picture of the Sacred Heart. Jesus 
looks so kind, and as if He understood." 

I venture to think it is hard to bottom all that 
lies hid in that incident. I may not know the 
full story of that child, only that she is one of 
those who go into the business to earn a mar- 
riage dot, and that she is a pretty, kindly, cheer- 
ful little person, very gay. But now I realise 
something more. She is a product of our mod- 
ern paganism. She has known no other law- 
giver than the state of modern France. The 
very name of God had been expunged from her 
school-books. And she has a very human heart 
which can be broken, and it was to such as she 
that Jesus said, Come unto Me, and I will give 
you rest. 

Oh, for the end of all our folly ! Oh, for the 
destruction, in our religious society, of all this 
insistence upon numbers, and laws, and states ! 
We of the Church have got to face the facts — 
we are few, despised, disestablished, discred- 
ited ; and we have got to tear down all conven- 
tions, face all persecutions, outlive all preju- 
dices, and go out to win a race that is rejoicing 
in pagan liberty to the slavery of Jesus Christ. 
And we have only one argument : that our faith 



126 STANDING BY 

brings joy, even of earth, that is not of this 
worid; joy that nothing else can give, and joy 
that nothing can quench. 

If it does. The worid, looking at us, is not 
at all sure. 



XIY 

THE HANGAR 

IT is ten o 'clock in the evening, and a couple 
of hundred of the boys of the company to 
which I am attached (for "discipline and 
rations") are about to go on night-shift. It is 
nowise my duty to accompany them, but I like 
doing it occasionally, because I know of noth- 
ing which helps one to realise at least one as- 
pect of the War more than a night visit to the 
hangar. Even the unfortunates whose weari- 
some duty it is to be on their feet watching the 
boys at work from late in the evening until any 
time between five o'clock and seven o'clock in 
the chilly morning share a little of this sense, 
and I had been asked to make a point of com- 
ing this particular night, as some peculiarly in- 
teresting work was in progress. 

The boys lined up in the darkness and the 
mud — for it is nearly always mud here — 
between the huts. They are nondescriptly 
dressed, for uniforms have faded and odd geai 
has replaced lost articles long ere this, and no- 
body much minds so long as the work is done. 
In the dark one cannot see the end of the line, 

127 



128 STANDING BY 

and black faces are soon lost sight of, so we 
wait while the white N.C.O.'s go up and down 
to see if the turn-out is complete. The ser- 
geant gives the command. A rattling ** One- 
two, One-two, One-two," runs down the front 
rank, for that is our way of overcoming the dif- 
ficulty of the inability of the boys to count above 
half a dozen or so in English. ' ' Form Fours ! ' ' 
and the ''ones" stand fast, while the "twos" 
execute quite smartly that ancient Army for- 
mula, ''One pace to the rear with the left foot 
and one to the right with the right." It is all 
correct, and they re-form two deep, stand at 
ease, come to attention, stand at ease, and come 
to attention again, with the immemorial ritual. 
The officer takes over. The little business is 
done over again, and off we go through the 
muddy camp, sloshing into pools of dirty water 
and occasionally stumbling into holes, until we 
are out on the road. The "Gare Maritime" is 
just across the way, a wilderness of lines and 
rolling-stock and splitting arc-lamps that serve 
chiefly to make the shadows deeper. Eunning 
its full length across the lines looms the huge 
hangar, and beyond the hangar are the docks. 
Ships come up to the wharf and off-load into 
the hangar, whence the goods are loaded up 
again into rolling-stock as they are needed. 
And they are needed perpetually, so that not a 
moment of the day or night sees the place de- 
serted. 



THE HANGAR 129 

"We enter from the western end, and one sees 
at once that the hangar, commonplace as it is, 
has its beauties and its mysteries. The new- 
comer is bewildered by its size. At least half 
a mile long and some two hundred and fifty 
yards wide, it is a great, gaunt, enormous shed 
of iron and steel. Trains run into it and are 
dwarfed to insignificance. Ships of three or 
four thousand tons stretch in a long line out- 
side the right-hand wall, which is broken by 
enormous gaps of sliding doors. Men appear 
in it like ants, and there is a confused diin clank- 
ing of machinery ever going on. High over- 
head hang the electric lights, and they recede 
till they merge into lines of light in the far 
distance, where, through what looks like a small 
hole, enormous motor-lorries are continually en- 
tering and leaving by the huge farther gate. 
But these many lights only serve to shed a dim, 
diffused radiance about, and half the place is 
shadow. Boys are emerging from blackness in 
endless succession with trucks which pass across 
some open lighted place and disappear behind 
some one or other of the great masses of boxes 
or crates or bales or sacks which constitute the 
stores. 

We pass out through one of the doors in the 
great side of the hangar, and find that but 20 
feet or so separates us from the water's edge. 
Standing there, and looking up the wharf and 
over the dock-basin, one sees how much of 



130 STANDING BY 

beauty there can be even in modern practical 
machinery, even in filth and mud. The water 
gleams dully under the stars, and far down and 
across it lights gleam and flicker, red, white, 
and green. Running up the waterside and 
spanning the 20 feet of wharf at right angles 
high overhead, to connect with the roof of the 
hangar, are the structures which bear the huge 
cranes. The great arms stick out each from 
its own box of clattering machinery in a suc- 
cession of nightmare forms that fade out of 
sight in the distance and the night, but in each 
box gleams the yellow light by which the man 
controls the monster. Almost like sentient 
creatures, the arms swing in their semicircle, 
dropping tentacles into the holds of the ships, 
gripping merchandise, swinging it aloft and 
round out of the vessel, and dropping it on the 
wharf-side. Then a score of our boys, at each 
point, run forward like ants and seize upon it. 
The chains are uncoupled, the load falls apart, 
its component bales or boxes are rushed off 
through the side of the hangar on hand-trucks, 
and the tentacle chains are aloft into the night 
for a new load. None seems ever to be long 
idle. As fast as one ship is empty, another 
takes her place. As fast as the stores are built 
up into monstrous heaps in the hangar, those 
heaps are eaten away on the other side by boys 
who load the stuff into railway-trucks— night 



THE HANGAR 131 

and day, week in and week out, for the Army 
in France must be fed. 

One's mind gropes with the organisation, and 
is fairly baffled bj^ it. How wonderful is the 
machine which can gather this mass of mate- 
rial constantly from the ends of the earth, dump 
it here and at a few other like places, collect 
and scatter it to the far trench-line, and num- 
ber each bale and sack as it goes! The world 
has never before seen such an organisation. 
The food of three million men, the food of their 
horses, the food of their guns — guns themselves, 
tanks, rolling-stock, waggons, automobiles — all 
these are poured continually on these wharves. 
Certain waste there must be, certain blunder- 
ing, or so one would think. But the goods get 
there ; that is the end of the argument. 

Three million men, and not a man or a horse 
or a gun (at last) goes hungry, day after day, 
unless it be temporarily for a small sector 
somewhere within range of the enemy's guns. 
For myself, I like to think of the all but infinite 
number of links in the chain, and that our boys 
are a coupling indispensable. We grouse 
sometimes at our unromantic labouring work, 
but, good heavens ! what romance is here ! The 
sons of Chaka and Moshesh have come six thou- 
sand miles to feed men from every land and 
island in our wide-flung Empire who make up 
the Army in France ! 

Let us go a little nearer and watch the unit 



132 STANDING BY 

with which we came at work. The first group 
is unloading sacks of oats. They are swung by 
the dozen or so out of the ship, and run on 
trucks by man-power to the "conveyor." This 
is a neat mechanical contrivance of perpetually 
moving iron bars in ladder form, running, a 
foot or so off the ground, across the hangar to 
the stack that is being made. It is in coupled 
lengths of perhaps 20 feet each, and at each 
joining of two lengths sits a boy whose duty it 
is to see that the sack does not catch in the ma- 
chinery. Thirty yards from the ship the con- 
veyor ceases, and an elevator, set at an angle 
up to 45 degrees, lifts the 100-pound sacks up 
to the required height. At the end of the con- 
veyor stand two boys, who, with mathematical 
regularity and seemingly tirelessly, swing the 
sacks off to three couples, who pass them on 
and place them on the elevator. At the top of 
the stack a dozen or more are at work building 
them up. There is a clank of machinery all 
the time, and the never-ending line of white 
sacks comes from the gloom, passes through the 
light, and mounts into the gloom out of sight. 
Thousands of tons of oats have been dis- 
charged here, but the next ship carries a com- 
posite cargo. Frozen meat, bully-beef in tins, 
cheeses, biscuits in boxes, sardines, vegetables, 
sides of bacon, tins of jam, margarine, and I 
know not what else, are being stacked each in 
its own place. From hay to copper bars, from 



THE HANGAR 133 

quinine to disinfectants, from mangles and 
wheelbarrows to shovels and buckets, tlie stores 
roll into the Army in France. But farther on 
is a still more wonderful sight. 

Still larger cranes are lifting bodily from a 
cavernous hold strange hideous shapes of a 
nightmare. Each as it is dropped on the wharf- 
side is boarded from a tiny side-door by a man 
or two, and in a few minutes, with protesting 
clanks and shrieks, it rolls away into the night 
under its own power. One is seeing the arrival 
of the tanks. But possibly the marvel of the 
whole business is the arrival of ambulance-cars 
and even railway-engines, which are lifted out 
and seem to start away the moment the girding 
chains are released. 

At one end of the wharf is a strange snug lit- 
tle sanctum. You steal precariously over 
chains and bolts round the edge of the docks 
and enter a low door. Within, bright with pic- 
tures and w^arm, are the two rooms of the dock 
officers' mess, where one can have a hot drink 
at any hour of the night. Strange people 
gather there. Elderly men can be met with 
here who have been senior magistrates or pro- 
consuls where one white man and a file of black 
police under the Flag rule thousands by a word, 
and who have thrown it up for a junior subal- 
tern's star in a black labour battalion. From 
the ends of the earth they have gathered in that 
room — padres, landowners, officials, members 



134 STANDING BY 

of the parliaments of the daughter-nations of 
the Empire. You can hear from them how to 
kill lion in Rhodesia, or run a sheep ranch in 
Australia, or protect His Majesty's interests in 
Singapore. Unsung, these men, all but un- 
known among the millions of the Army in 
France. Yet theirs is not the least heroism. 
Watch up on a cold wet winter's night from 7 
p.m. till 5 a.m., and imagine what it would be 
with your fifty years and dozen of tropical win- 
ters behind you, and you will know. They and 
the boys they officer are a tribute to the power 
of Empire and the love of England such as is 
not beaten even in the air or on the sea. 

And they are at it to-night, feeding the Army 
in France. . . . 



XY 

CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 

FOR three years I read about Christmas 
on the Western Front after having 
vainly tried to spend it there, but this 
year that joy was mine. And I understand 
that I was very lucky, for there never had been 
before such a Christmas as this. In the first 
place, there were more turkeys than ever; in 
the second, there were more plum-puddings; 
and, in the third, there were even mince-pies. 
We read all about it at once in that ubiquitous 
daily of whose circulation the proprietors used 
to talk so much, but of which less is said now, 
probably because even they are bewildered by 
the numbers of those who read what they serve 
up. After that we read about it in the illus- 
trated weeklies. The turkeys had articles to 
themselves in each, until one wondered vaguely 
if there had not been perhaps some mistake in 
one's upbringing, and that possibly Christmas 
was the commemoration of the creation of tur- 
keys. I searched more closely for evidence, 
and all but concluded it was the commemoration 
of the discovery of mistletoe. 

136 



136 STANDING BY 

Then I lighted on a paragraph which in- 
formed us that there had been no disgraceful 
recollection of our common Christianity on that 
day. Men christened had not ceased to try to 
kill each other for a moment because it was the 
birthday of Jesus Cheist. Turkeys there were, 
yes, and plum-puddings, but no ''truce of 
God." One could at least congratulate oneself 
on that. We are convinced, this fourth Christ- 
mas of the War, that every Saxon and Bava- 
rian peasant, as every Prussian, is a rejoicing 
baby-killer. 

But at last I found what I sought. There 
was no textual record anywhere of Christ's 
Mass, but there was in one paper a large pic- 
torial illustration of ''A Christmas Sermon be- 
hind the Firing Line. ' ' I gazed with awe. At 
first I thought it must be a dreadful joke, be- 
cause the men's faces bore a more pained ex- 
pression than is even usual during the sermon ; 
but then it dawned on me that the big title did 
not agree with the letterpress — a minor detail. 
It was not the sermon but the concluding bene- 
diction that was depicted, although strangely 
enough, for it would seem curiously out of the. 
normal place, "the man at the harmonium is 
ready to strike up the Christmas hjTun." Oh, 
surely it is a wonderful picture ! I shall keep it 
for my moments of deepest depression, when 
Punch fails, and even the Spectator and the 
Guardian cannot arouse me. The clergyman 



CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 137 

has a tricky little moustache and an Oxford 
hood (Warham Guild), and he is giving the 
blessing with a Popish gesture. The men have 
''set and stern" countenances, so like Tommy's 
at a church parade, especially on Christmas 
night. While ''as a foil to the soldiers," a 
French peasant-woman and some children stand 
■ — looking on, the artist thought. Maybe he is 
right there. It must have seemed very won- 
derful to them. 

Christmas having been thus recorded, it 
strikes me that I might perhaps add shortly to 
the record. I promise not to do so exhaustive- 
ly; indeed, I have not the pen for that. But 
I should like to describe how thirty odd boys of 
a half company of Basuto, and I, spent Christ- 
mas from the old-fashioned point of view. It is 
not necessary to bother about the dinner in the 
evening, though one of the turkeys did come our 
way, I am glad to say. But the turkeys have 
had justice done to them. 

In the first place. Providence was upon our 
side. The powers that be had decided to inocu- 
late the half company on the evening of the 
23rd December, a circumstance not perhaps 
seen immediately to be related to the subject in 
hand, but capable of explanation. For that en- 
tailed the 24th being deprived of their labour 
until, on the lapse of twenty-four hours, to be 
precise at 6.30 p.m. of that date, they could be 
called out once more for the night-shift. Such 



138 STANDING BY 

providential dispensation gave me my chance; 
we migiit have our Christ's Mass ahnost on the 
day, indeed upon the Eve, if we could find any 
place for an altar. Inquiries almost led to 
despair. There is no Y. M. C. A. in the camp, 
no canteen, no recreation-room, no spare cu- 
bicle even, and the boys sleep and eat in great 
huts taking sixty or so, in each of whom the 
greater part will be heathen. But the sergeant- 
major came to my rescue and offered the Ser- 
geants' Mess. They themselves would not be 
up at the hour I wanted it, as the company was 
to have the holiday, and it was a big and con- 
venient room. I was very grateful. 

At 5.30, then, I was up and out of my own 
camp. It was terribly cold, especially to us 
Africans, and still dark. By six the congre- 
gation was gathering, and I prepared for the 
confessions. One by one the burly fellows came 
in, to make that individual prostration of them- 
selves upon the mercy of God which is so much 
more real than any general confession. One by 
one as each finished they went out into the snow 
to make room for the next, and I could hear 
them stamping and swinging their arms to keep 
warm. Eighteen in all there were, and at last 
we could all come in together. I set up the 
altar. A few drapings, two pictures, one of 
the Mother with her Son, and the other of the 
Crucifixion, this last between the candles, soon 
transformed the common table, and I slipped 



CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 139 

the altar-stone in nnder the white cloths. Flow- 
ers we had none, but I had brought two sprays 
of richly berried holly, and these added to our 
festive appearance. A server from my own 
parish attended me, and just as in our far-away 
Basuto home we sang the Christmas Missa. The 
men's voices in the Sesuto words behind car- 
ried me easily those six thousand miles, and, as 
we would have done there, we all knelt together, 
when our Lord had come, to sing the ''Adeste 
Fideles." 

The boys were out nearly twelve hours from 
that evening, and returned to eat and sleep. But 
from midday on the 25th all work ceased in dock 
and hangar, and thus we had the afternoon free. 
I was round at 2.30, to find somewhat of a com- 
motion on foot, for a party of drunken soldiers 
had called to the boys over the barbed wire and 
asked them why they did not come out and enjoy 
themselves like the rest. When these had been 
moved on, the sergeants had to deal with an ex- 
cited camp, ready for anything, and arguing 
against the compound system heart and soul. 
The black and white question cropped up, and 
my service came as a happy intervention. So 
we gathered for Evensong in one of the big 
huts, boys still sleepy in their blankets round 
the walls, tables still littered with the fragments 
of dinner, but a growing crowd at one end. All 
sorts and conditions were there, heathen. Non- 
conformists, Roman Catholics, and my boys, 



140 STANDING BY 

the latter in a knot round me. We had a great 
time. We sang several hymns to draw off more 
men from the excited crowd outside, and then 
got on with the shortened Evening Service. It 
was strange to hear how well they sang Magnifi- 
cat and Nunc Di^nittis. We do not attempt 
psalms, or perhaps I should say I do not, and if 
you explain who first sang, and where, those 
evangelical hj^mns of Mary and Simeon, they 
have a wonderful beauty. I talked for a little 
about the meaning of the Angels' Song: that 
true peace would only come on earth when all 
men gave glory to God in the highest ; and then 
I suggested my Christmas treat. 

Just about this time the folk would be mak- 
ing their way across the Basuto hills to the little 
churches that they might close Christmas Day 
before the Crib in each. Last year we had had 
our own. It had been literally dug into the mud 
floor of the church, a shelter of boughs against 
the rough stone walls, very like to what Joseph 
must have put up for Mary in Bethlehem, if, as 
I suppose, the cave and the stable mean that in 
those parts, as with us, shallow caves under the 
overhanging lip of some kopje are shut in by 
low stone walls to make a cattle kraal. A lamp 
in a native pot and the star had been all the 
light, and it had fallen on the Holy Babe among 
the straw, the kneeling Mother and the adoring 
Protector of that Holy Family. We, then, would 
go out and find a Crib and worship with the 



CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 141 

others, in spirit if not in fact. There was hearty 
assent. 

It chanced that not far away there was a 
Catholic chapel, dedicated, appropriately to the 
season, to Our Lady of the Snows. It stands 
at cross-roads, in a fearful wilderness of mud 
and stagnant water and railway lines and filth, 
half-built, with only a house or two near it. We 
fell in, then, and marched there, thirty-six of 
us in all, a few being Roman Catholics them- 
selves. I would not take other than men who 
understood, for otherwise we might have 
had more than I could manage. Also I was 
not sure what reception we should get. I my- 
self was a heretic, and I was doubtful if we 
should be allowed to do more than look. 

The French congregation, with a sprinkling 
of Tommies, had just finished Benediction as 
we arrived, and the old cure was even then di- 
vesting himself of his stole. There was a little 
stir as we marched in. The boys looked anx- 
iously about, and recognised the signs of the 
Presence of our Lord in His Sacrament with- 
out being told. They genuflected and slipped 
into pews. I went up and asked in my best 
French for leave to say the Joyful Mysteries 
of the Rosary with them in Sesuto. But my 
best French is not very good. 

''Ehf" queried the priest. 

*'Can we say the Rosary in Sesuto, Father," 
I asked, ' ' and then have a look at the Crib ? ' ' 



142 STANDING BY 

He glanced at my collar and smiled. 

'* You are a Catholic priest?" he asked. 

**Well, not as you mean," said I desperately 
in English. Then, ''Anglican — ^but these boys 
have no church as in their own homes, where 
they would be now at the Crib, and I thought 
. . . perhaps ..." 

''The Rosary, you say?" he questioned. 

I held up my own beads. He smiled again. 
"Of course," he said, "anything you like. You 
are a Catholic?" 

I am not sure that he understood even now, 
and I do not know that I blame him, but after 
trying again and not getting much more for- 
ward, I acted on his permission. We all knelt 
before the Sacrament. First we sang "Adeste 
Fideles" to the old tune, and then we said the 
Joyful Mysteries and thought of our Lord's 
Incarnation. Then I led them in the Divine 
Praises and the Salve Regina, and then, row by 
row, we w^ent up to the Crib. It was poor — not 
nearly so good as ours. But these French do 
teach us something. The Babe was very big, 
probably the first part of a church set to be 
slowly acquired; Joseph, Mary, and the oxen 
might have come from a child's Noah's Ark. I 
would never have dreamed of so dreadful a mix- 
ture. But they were right: the boys made no 
adverse comment. The star drew us, and the 
boughs of green stuff smelt very fragrant. Each 
genuflected as he drew near, and peered in ; and 



CHRISTMAS IN THE B.E.F. 143 

one, after much fumbling with dirty papers, 
pushed a ten-franc piece into the manger. The 
cure stood by and watched it all, and so did the 
French behind. 

By this time it had grown quite dusk, and we 
had to go. We knelt once more together — sang 
Nunc Dimittis to a plain song setting, and the 
white people recognised the tune. Two or three 
girls joined in in Latin. The cure, a white- 
haired old man with a very kindly smile, knelt 
on the pavement. 

One last look around at the pictured faces and 
the twinkling lamps of that poor little chapel, 
and we were out into the wet and cold and snow. 
''What a lovely church!" said one to me, as he 
passed. 

''Yes," said I. . . . 

We dismissed in camp. As they broke away, 
a lance-corporal stopped them. "We thank 
you, we thank you very much. Father," he said. 
"This is a strange land, and we are far from 
home, but we have seen familiar things to-day. ' ' 

"Eh," they chorused, native-wise; "truly it 
is so." 

Maybe none of us will forget our 1917 Christ- 
mas on the Western Front, even although it 
was behind the line. There is not very much 
that we chaplains can do for our black boys 
under the inevitable conditions of labour here, 
but it is surely something, which may be re- 
membered next year and many after years in 



144 STANDING BY 

the valleys of the Drackensberg, that in a land 
so far and among conditions so strange, Christ- 
mas brought the first familiar things — the 
Mother and the Crib. 



XVI 

CONCERTS 

AT first sight concerts may not seem to 
have much bearing on war, but a little 
reflection reveals the direct opposite. 
Without referring to the obvious — that a con- 
cert overnight often assists you to drive your 
bayonet better into a Hun the next morning, it 
is there that one may learn a good deal about 
the psychology of war. A Martian, visiting this 
globe for the purpose of reporting later in The 
Mars on the civilisation of the Earth, might do 
worse than attend half a dozen music-halls. 
Certainly merely to visit churches and museums 
and factories would not be sufficient. He might 
see then how the world prays, thinks, and works, 
but he would not see how it laughs; and per- 
haps laughter is a more sure clue to character 
than anything else. 

The subject is, of course, vast, especially if, 
as I, you should feel yourself inadequate to say 
when a concert is not a concert, but something 
greater or less. In a word, the concert is 
generic. Our age has reduced a great number 
of its plays and the majority of its religious ob- 

145 



146 STANDING BY 

servances to the form of the concert, to a suc- 
cession, that is, of entertaining items which 
have practically no connection and aim at no 
more definite object than amusement. This 
tendency, notable before the War, has reached 
its zenith in the B.E.F., of necessity. Large 
mixed audiences, artists drawn from ourselves 
with remarkably little opportunity for re- 
hearsals demanding the presence of them all, 
has made for it. He that hath a song, or a reci- 
tation, or a turn of any sort in the Mess, giveth 
it. All is grist for the mill. We become large- 
hearted as time goes on, and broad-minded. 
We still applaud when the great round world is 
turning, then we receive the assurance of fi- 
delity till death to Annie Laurie, even when 
'^ Absent" is sung. And even a padre may be 
forgiven if he finds it less easy to blush than 
formerly. 

From the well-stocked garden, then, we must 
pick a few blooms, and I think that four concerts 
stand out as types in my memory. No one can 
deny that one star differeth from another star 
in glory, but of their particular glory, each was 
a star. And I would begin with one by the 
South African natives. 

They had planned the whole thing themselves, 
and except that a white sergeant played for 
them and another had illuminated the pro- 
grammes, the concert was entirely native. We 
were a mixed audience that had gathered to be 



CONCERTS 14T 

amused. There were the boys of the company, 
their white N.C.O. 's and officers, the Colonel of 
the group, some visiting officers, and a couple 
of Frenchmen, and even we of South Africa 
were surprised. I cannot remember the order 
of the proceedings, but that is unimportant. 
There was, however, a quartette that sang rag- 
time to banjo accompaniments in up-to-date 
music-hall style, of whom one boy would prob- 
ably make large money on the stage. He had 
a really remarkable voice. There was a choir 
which gave us, unaccompanied, unexpected, and 
dumbfoundingly, a chorus from oratorio — gave 
it us reverently, and entirely without prompt- 
ing; nor can I parallel the item at a B.E.F. con- 
cert. The words ran: Glory be to God Who 
giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ our 
Lord. There was a recitation by a native cor- 
poral who spoke such capital and dramatic 
English that had I not seen his face I should 
have supposed a really first-rate white elocu- 
tionist was speaking. He declaimed to us Abra- 
ham Lincoln's speech at the dedication of Get- 
tysburg Cemetery. The familiar words, so 
spoken, fired the blood again. You remember 
how it goes — the nation had been there con- 
ceived in liberty; that hallowed ground stood 
for the faith that all men shall be free and equal ; 
it was their memorial before God and the na- 
tions that Government of the people shall be 
by the people and for the people. One glanced 



148 STANDING BY 

up again; yes, it was a black boy whose voice 
rang as if the words were written on his heart. 
And then a few of them sang a mission hymn : 
' ' Give a thought to Africa. " " There are voices 
calling for the living God. . . . God bless Africa, 
and her sons and her daughters." And then 
the quartette again, in "Soft and Low." And 
then, amid wild excitement, bare feet beating the 
floor of the great hut and the hands of the black 
part of the audience clapping as the women 
would clap at the kraal, we witnessed a Zulu 
War Dance in costume, and in lack of it. And 
then "God Save the King," sonorous, compel- 
ling. And all this from savage South Africa, in 
France, because of a European war, my mas- 
ters I And, staggering marvel of marvels, it is 
nothing to most who pass by ! 

Against this, which I take it requires no com- 
ment, I would set what ought not strictly to be 
called a concert, but for which I claim place 
here inasmuch as it was given on a regular 
concert night, in a series of concerts, by a mem- 
ber of the Y.M.C.A. Concert Party which visited 
us at that time every Thursday. The audience, 
too, was a concert audience : I mean it was com- 
posed of practically the same body of men as 
had been there the week before and would be 
the week after. They packed the hall, which 
was blue with tobacco smoke, and the great ma- 
jority were privates of the A.O.D., A.S.C., and 
R.E. They applauded at first vigorously, 



CONCERTS 149 

finally thunderously, and they listened with rapt 
attention the entire time, which was well over 
the hour, and this although there was only one 
performer and no musical instrument. What, 
then, went they out for to see? A lightning- 
pencil artist, perhaps, or a quick-change per- 
former? Or a conjuring wizard? Or a cinema- 
tograph lecture? Or Miss Maud Allan? Or 
Mr. Horatio Bottomley? No. I would give 
you a dozen more guesses. It was a lady, ef- 
fectively but not remarkably dressed (or un- 
dressed), reciting a Greek tragedy. 

In its way, I am not sure that it was not the 
most remarkable performance I have ever wit- 
nessed, and I am glad to be able to say so, for 
I had no opportunity of congratulating the lady 
at the time. Her method was to tell the story, 
breaking off to recite the more striking speeches 
and choruses as they occurred. With great 
genius she sustained the several parts in turn, 
with no other aid than that of her voice. Nor 
did she talk down to us. Nemesis was unfolded 
as surely, as slowly, and as grimly, as it had 
been in Greece. We confronted the terrible 
spectacle of love torn between duty and affec- 
tion ; of the strong powerless ; of the weak pas- 
sionately, divinely, victorious. It was an appeal 
to the soul, after its kind, as sure as any ser- 
mon. 

The boys, then, showed that they understood. 
It was a triumphant vindication of Hoxton and 



150 STANDING BY 

Hammersmith. To look back, through the drift- 
ing clouds of tobacco smoke, at those English 
faces — shrewd some, curiously animal others, 
but all stamped with the hall-mark of our civil- 
isation — was to realise that the English poor, 
tricked by the cheap music-hall, robbed by 
bureaucracy, and exploited by a mockery of de- 
mocracy, have yet a soul. We lifted our eyes 
heavenward that night. We watched the com- 
bats of the gods, we who attend generally to the 
shallow bickerings of modern men. They who 
have died in Flanders, many of them, I doubt 
not, since, with the devoted heroism that ani- 
mated Sparta, Athens, and Troy, but died on 
the whole blind to the nobility of their dying, 
they, I say, saw through the medium of that 
gifted lady, something of the mythical beauty 
of Helen and of the magical valour of Achilles 
which is theirs, too, though they know not. It 
was a night of wonder. We came out to the 
darkness of the countryside, lone if it had not 
been for our far-stretching hutments, and to 
the garishness of canteen and mess-room; but 
we had been on the Mount of Olympus. I sa- 
lute you, lady, wherever you be. 

As an example of the extraordinary excellence 
of local concert parties I would set down a great 
A.O.D. Revue of last Christmas at a base sea- 
port. It was entirely worthy of the London 
Stage. Everything in it had been created by 
the men of the unit. The scenery, the songs, the 



CONCERTS 161 

music, the patter, the dresses, the orchestra, 
even the novelty of the finale when the colonel 
himself, qua colonel, and in uniform, appeared 
on the stage, was original, and extraordinarily 
well done. The piece carried you away. One 
scene, a representation of a part of the great 
Hangar itself in which most of the actors slept, 
entirely carried out, amid roars of laughter, 
in dumb show, was really remarkably well 
acted. And as one looked, one reflected on 
many things. It is commonplace to point out 
that so much genius in the ranks is due to the 
nationalisation of the army, and that here you 
saw, in miniature, how every profession, every 
class, every talent, had been drawn into the 
great service. But it is more interesting that 
here one saw Tommy's own idea of humour, 
and not someone else's idea at which he is asked 
to laugh — and does, with the readiness of good- 
fellowship. There was wit about it. The comic 
element was made up, not by the comic parson 
who is utterly unlike anything that ever existed, 
not by the typical funny man who is only funny 
because he is a grotesque caricature, not by the 
expression of a sense of the ludicrous in much 
of the tenderness of life. We laughed because 
the inanities of the normal revues were exposed 
as mercilessly as the trivialities of authority — 
those trivialities that authority takes so serious- 
ly. We laughed because we saw exhibited the 
incredible nature of the fate that is ours. We 



152 STANDING BY 

laughed because we know it to be a very jest of 
the gods that we should have to live as we live 
and do as we do. And we laughed at ourselves, 
because being men and decent citizens, we found 
ourselves so helplessly the sport of circum- 
stances. In a word, we were not far removed 
that night from the spirit of the trenches. We 
laughed, if not at violent death, at least at some- 
thing as grim and as preposterous. 

There was something inspiritingly Christian 
about it all. One felt that the Devil must have 
been exasperated, as were those Eoman pro- 
consuls w^ho subjected tender girls to exposure, 
the whip, the fire, the steel, and heard, as the 
mutilated bodies of their all but murdered vic- 
tims were tossed to the beasts, the ringing tones 
of victorious laughter. One wonders if the Ger- 
mans laugh. I should doubt it. And it is be- 
cause your Tommy of to-day laughs, that one 
knows England cannot be beaten. It is not so 
much the unbreakability of those thin lines that 
rope in Germany on the West so flexible up to 
a point, so inexorably beyond ; it is not the grow- 
ing output of the never-silent workshops; it is 
not the tireless, unshaken, traffic of the seas ; it 
is none of these things, great as they are, that 
show that, despite our faults and pettinesses, 
we cannot be beaten. But it is the fact that men 
can be torn from the decencies of life, from its 
sanities, from its hopes and joys, and can be 
flung down in utter discomfort as pawns on the 



CONCERTS 153 

board whereon is played this game of devils 
in all its tragic madness, and yet can there en- 
dure all things, hope all things, believe all 
things, with a gaiety no less than the gaiety of 
Christian men — this is victory. 

Lastly, there is your more normal concert, 
such an one as I attended the other night. It is 
usually distinctly good. The same stray talent 
is there, as unexpected as Handel in his garret, 
but with it is that pitiful serving up of the popu- 
lar airs of the moment with which the singer, 
good but not great, has perforce to be content. 
Last night we had a trick cyclist who must sure- 
ly have made his £1000 a year in that dim age 
before the war, and a conjurer of first-class 
ability. Their comrades were young men of 
the good amateur stamp, and the rest of their 
programme was such as you might find in a 
score of camps in the B.E.F. somewhere in 
France any night. The audience, as always, 
was appreciative, but I read again the lesson 
which each such concert seems to me to teach. 

It is that the death-knell of the military pro- 
fession has sounded. I may be wrong, but I 
think so. I do not say that armies shall cease 
or war not come again, but I do say that the 
professional soldier of song and story has 
passed, never to return in our day. We shall 
probably have to maintain, for dealing with 
uncivilised peoples, a military police, and their 
calling may still be a little more hazardous than 



154 STANDING BY 

that of the Metropolitan Constabulary owing to 
the stupidity of governments. Otherwise, of 
course, the conflict of rebellious natives with a 
force equipped with aeroplanes and Lewis guns 
can never be anything else than a dangerless 
massacre. Probably also we shall be compelled 
to live under a system of conscription whereby 
all the adult male population shall be ready to 
handle bayonet and bomb until the family of na- 
tions learns decent behaviour and conscript 
armies become no more than national gymnasia. 
But this is not war in the old sense. It is 
only, as Mr. Philip Gibbs perhaps first pointed 
out, diabolically ghastly murder, conducted on 
a large scale in the still larger intervals of bore- 
dom, waste of time, and discomfort. Gone for 
ever is the glitter and in a sense the glory. Our 
modern soldiers live and die gloriously because 
they must, but we do not glory in our war. 
We regret it, and curse the authors of it. We 
are bigger-hearted, wider-eyed, than our an- 
cestors. There is no glory to us, per se, in cleav- 
ing foreigners in pieces. As a necessity, we 
may do it, and reap glory in doing it, but though 
a man may find glory in choking a mad dog 
with his bare hands, it is not a glory that he 
goes to seek or sings. He knows, moreover, 
what is the reality of war: 

"A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job: 
Men lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid, 
Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime 
That wrenches gun-boot down from bleeding heel. 



CONCERTS 155 

And cakes in itching armpits, navel, ears; 
Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering; 
Men driving men to death and worse than death; 
Men maimed and blinded; men against machines — 
ricsh versus iron, concrete, flame, and wire; 
Men choking out their souls in poison-gas; 
Men squelched into the slime of trampling feet; 
Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away, 
Cursing, with their last breath, the living God 
Because He made them, in His image, men. 
So — were your talent mine — I'd write of war. ..." 

Such is the lesson of our songs at the con- 
cert, for Tommy, over here, does not care much 
even for patriotic ones. But this is not to say 
that he is not patriotic. Moreover, English- 
men of the fields and cities will care a thousand 
times more for England and things English now 
that they have spent so long abroad. But to 
love one's mother passionately is not to hate 
another man for loving his. True love is not 
jealousy, and it casts out fear. 

Fear and ignorance are the causes of most 
wars. We moderns, then, fear less because we 
know more, and are jealous hardly at all. I 
suppose there are still dynastic ambitions; I 
know there are increasingly commercial lusts 
utterly unscrupulous and insatiable; but your 
average man does not feel these. To him, then, 
war is just naked war ; and since he knows it to 
be scientific destruction coupled with every ob- 
jectionable concomitant — loss of liberty, waste 
of time, unnatural conditions, unpleasant sur- 
roundings, and much pain — he hates it. Tommy 
sings, ' ' Oh, it 's a beautiful war, ' ' and not * ' Bule 



156 STANDING BY 

Britannia." He is a civilian in uniform; and 
although he has indeed learnt of the army, and 
benefited by discipline, still he is anxious to get 
back into civilian clothes, out of which he will 
be less anxious to step than ever. After all, if 
everybody does a thing, and everybody has to 
do a thing, it loses its charm. Some branches 
of the Service retain the old glamour — the Air 
Service, for instance — and they may continue 
to do so, but, on the whole, the glory has de- 
parted. Militarism, for good or ill, is dead. The 
soldier may be still as necessary as the police- 
man, but he will have no greater praise in the 
earth. 

It is easy to dismiss it with a nod, but the 
passing of Militarism demands more. Among 
the Hindoos, the soldier is next to the priest and 
of not much lower caste than he. Our past has 
largely been the storj^ of generals and wars, 
or at least it has been told as if it were, and 
that because the story seemed so to those who 
reviewed it. After all, the standards of hero- 
ism, of endurance, of self-sacrifice have been 
set by the men of the Services. The nation 
has carried itself proudly and has lived more 
nobly because of its battles. The soldier, per- 
meating society, has led us to embrace loyalty 
to the sovereign as a personal thing, the idea of 
England as a living mistress. And now he goes. 
His place is taken by the mechanic who turns 
the handle of a machine-gun at the bidding of 



CONCERTS 157 

a Prime Minister, dressed in a drab uniform, 
and chiefly anxious to get it over. It is im- 
possible to escape the reflection that we must 
serve our new ideals nobly if our standard is 
not to fall. They are higher ideals. But the 
higher a man climbs, the farther he may fall, 
and the more steady must be his head. 

Not for nothing is that contrast which one 
has noted again and again in France. The Eng- 
lish concert ends with the National Anthem ; the 
French republican concert with a rush for the 
door almost before the fall of the curtain. There 
seems to us a curious blank. Yes, but do we 
still sing "God Save the King" as it used to 
be sung? When it meant Queen Victoria men 
sang it as they who clung to a personal mon- 
archy very tenderly, if with a smile ; now that 
it means *^God save the Sovereign People" 
there is a danger that we, too, shall put our- 
selves first and make a rush for the door. If 
we do, the end of the play will be the fall of 
the curtain on an ignoble house. 



XYII 
FLOTSAM OF WAR 

STANDING by in war-time, one nat- 
urally sees more of the extraordinary 
pathos there is in human affairs than 
at any other time. I say "pathos," for I mean 
those infinitely pathetic sorrows which are si- 
lently endured and have been innocently in- 
curred, as a result of the clash of powers which 
the sufferer can scarcely even understand. At 
the outbreak of War it came as a kind of night- 
mare, that awful vision of millions of men be- 
ing thrown at each other, and of their being 
mangled and torn, while all the time there was 
practically no personal quarrel, and one hardly 
knew why War was coming at all. So the 
exodus from Antwerp or the passion of Serbia 
has made strong men weep. But I saw some- 
thing equally pathetic the other day. 

It was our native hospital. One rides to it 
up the beautiful little river-valley, with the 
great woods on the left and the high ridge 
crowned by the ancient castle on the right. The 
forest was as beautiful as it is possible to con- 
ceive. The ground in places was one golden 

158 



FLOTSAM OF WAR 159 

sheet of wild daffodils, and the rarer patches 
of dark blue violets nestling among the still- 
brown fallen leaves and their own dark emer- 
ald contrasted exquisitely. The young green 
buds of the trees were everywhere bursting in 
the spring sunshine. The air was pure and 
clear after rain, and the birds sang as if God 
would hereby teach us what joy was meant to 
be. And so I came to the hospital. 

It is, of course, trim, clean, and neat. From 
the pole in the midst of the careful little garden 
droops the Union Jack and the Eed Cross. The 
officers' quarters had already some gaiety of 
garden flowers, and behind, up the slope of the 
hill, ran the orderly bungalows of the wards, 
with a tier of two-deckers behind. The gravel 
paths skirt grass, and the beds of the patients 
were many of them set out in the sun. Blue- 
clad natives moved about and smiled content- 
edly enough, and a good many had a hope of 
speedy removal home. A good many, did I 
say! Perhaps it would be truer to say that all 
had such a hope— therein lies much of the 
pathos. 

I entered a ward. Here there were few well 
enough to be up, and the boys lay blanketed on 
the rough beds, each the regulation paces from 
its neighbour. It strikes a visitor first that the 
patients have few of those treasured posses- 
sions which each man has in a white hospital, 
or if any, it is usually no more than Bible or 



160 STANDING BY 

hjTun-book or Prayer Book carefully lapped in 
newspaper. But for the most part they have 
nothing. They are strangers in a strange land. 
Their few chattels stand in some hut six 
thousand miles away, so few and rude that they 
will be unrecognisable litter of the earth again 
in a year or two, or rubbish on some civilised 
dust-heap. The native is of the earth, and when 
he passes he leaves few traces. A village to- 
day has no memorial left on the hillside to- 
morrow, when the grasses have grown over the 
site and the sherds of pottery have been tram- 
pled in by the beasts. Not that those odd sticks 
are not as precious to their owners as the treas- 
ures of the West to us, and therefore the boy 
who abandoned even his clothes for his uni- 
form, and has literally no familiar thing about 
him, feels his nakedness towards the end. 

For the more part, then, they lie silently, but 
here and there one brightens up and greets the 
friend he knows. Otherwise the long hours go 
by, and the dark-skinned boys rolled in blankets 
lie motionless unless they are tossed in pain. 
They hardly read, partly because many can- 
not, partly because they have nothing to read. 
They do not talk much, these sick in a strange 
land, chiefly because they have nothing to talk 
about. At home conversation is all but end- 
lessly of crops and beasts and horses ; here there 
are none of such things for them. They get 
comparatively few letters, and there is rarely 



FLOTSAM OF WAR 161 

any news in such as they do either receive or 
write ; for, although we have come to forget it, 
it takes generations of education to produce the 
art of letter-writing. They eat, they sleep, they 
suffer, that is all. Eagerness, vivacity, inter- 
est, these are characteristics of the negro at 
home ; and these in his sickness he is found per- 
force to have sacrificed to the god of war, as 
none other of the army of patients in France 
to-day. And it is impossible not to feel, as one 
stands by the bed and realises how the great 
world grips and strives without, that here is 
flotsam that has served its turn, and is cast up, 
now, indifferently. 

But I see one who greets me eagerly, very 
glad that I should have visited him. I go and 
stand over the bed, and I read the signs, the 
wasted flesh, the hectic cough, the tell-tale chart. 
Oh, but he is glad to see me. He had heard 
that I had come to the camp he had left, and 
he had hoped to be out by now and back again 
to see me there. However, he is sure he must 
be better, and at any rate the year is up in a 
couple of months, by which time he will see 
Africa again. His father writes to say that 
they want him back badly. No, he did not tell 
any news. And there is silence. . . . 

I wish I did not visualise it all so keenly. No, 
the father did not tell his son the news, be- 
cause he had no skill. He could not write of 
that upland cluster of huts above the lovely 



162 STANDING BY 

crystal-clear streamlet that comes tumbling 
from the great mountain, through the rocky 
gorge below the camp, into the well-known 
shaded river that flows between the great kopjes 
to the distant sea. It did not strike him to 
say that the peach was in bloom, and the pink 
petals fluttering down to the new green grass 
within the grey aloe hedge. Or that the sheep 
were lambing; or that the herds came lowing 
home, led by their ancient leader, every sweet- 
scented dusk ; or that the ponies still streamed 
across the veld with flying hoofs and tossing 
manes in such sunlight as the sick boy's eyes 
have not seen these ten long months. More, it 
hardly reached the consciousness of the patient 
that he yearned for such things ; but the sight of 
them might well make bini whole. 

And now? The doctor knows, and I know, 
but we two only, that that will not be. Com- 
pany by company their comrades will leave this 
land of France and see these things again, but 
some here, ever-dwindling, will be left behind. 
This boy could not stand the voyage. That 
bootmaker's outfit that he was so eagerly gath- 
ering — and he did good work, too — ^will stand 
idle on the shelves of the hut for ever, so far 
as he is concerned. The splendid old father, 
loyal soldier of the Government in a score of 
fights, unspoilt native with it all, will shade his 
eyes and look down the valley, as one by one 
those who went from his district return, but in 



FLOTSAM OF WAR 163 

vain. Stranded here, tossed up inarticulate 
and forgot by the eddies of the awful maelstrom, 
one of the least of its victims, but victim none 
the less, this lad among the rest will go not 
out again. 

It has so often fallen to my lot to take a na- 
tive funeral such as this will be, that I know 
exactly what will happen. There was one at 
Le Havre the other day. The boy's company 
had returned home, so that there was not even 
a mourning party of his own colour to follow 
him to the grave. Instead, the cheerful ser- 
geant saluted me in the gate, and led me to the 
cold mortuary '' chapel" that is no chapel at 
all. Oh ! it is decent enough, a square stone box 
with shelves inside (and on an empty one, for 
there were only two coffins that day, a bottle of 
ink, a pen, and the first book that I must sign), 
and Authority treats these even as the rest. 
There is the white firing party, and the bear- 
ers, and the Union Jack. But it cannot but be 
that there is less of humanity here than ever, 
for which of these Yorkshire Tommies, bur- 
dened with his own joys and woes as he steps, 
with arms reversed and slow feet, through the 
wilderness of stones and under the dripping 
wintry trees, can care for Pte. Mopedi, No. 
21,987, of the S.A.N.L.C? 

And because it is long to the sloping plot re- 
cently reclaimed where are the rows of wooden 
crosses of this African graveyard in a strange 



164 STANDING BY 

land, and because I alone remember that sunny- 
village on the mighty Berg, and because I feel 
so acutely the contrast of this crossless inhu- 
ma,n burying with that little Christian party of 
priest and mourners knit in sympathy just down 
that other slope, it is almost more than I can 
bear. But we come to the grave. The firing 
party takes post some twenty paces up the 
sticl^ soil of the hillside, and the staccato or- 
ders ring out. The six bearers lower the coffin 
and stand rigidly to attention. The sergeant 
falls in behind me and waits for me to begin. 
And I step forward with my Prayer Book, and 
all of them, waiting in the cold, wonder how 
much I shall shorten the tiresome service. . . . 
I defy them all. He was a Mosuto, and why 
should not he be buried, if so lonely here, with 
the words of his mother-tongue? Why should 
I read that stern cold psalm when none can 
understand or check me if I do not, and why not 
a passage more suitable for him? So it is the 
psalm of the Shepherd that I read over that 
grave and the story of that triumphant assem- 
bly before the throne of God and of the Lamb, 
whereat it will not be native or kindred that 
matter, but the white robes and the great tribu- 
lation endured. And then for the collects I 
close my book, for this English office has not 
the prayers I need. There must be one for 
the land who gives its sons this day to the dust 



FLOTSAM OF WAR 165 

of France, and one for the soul, so ignorant 
and forgot, which only the infinite pity of the 
Shepherd can succour now. And one more for 
the dark-skinned mourners who will weep in 
their own way when the story comes to be told, 
but never here, where the dead must die. 

Then I paused. Surreptitiously, even the 
men at attention were eyeing me. I did not 
know if King's regulations permitted it, but I 
said: ''This native found it as hard to die as 
you or I would. His black friends in Africa will 
grieve as truly as yours or mine would in Eng- 
land. God hath made of one blood all nations 
of men for to dwell on the face of the whole 
earth. Let us say altogether 'Our Father, 
which art in heaven' "... 

Staccato orders again. A black labourer is 
for all that a British soldier, and they present 
arms. The last post rings out and dies solemn- 
ly away. 

"German prisoner next, sir I Step this way, 
please.' ' Flotsam of War. . . . 

I climbed to the old castle on the hill that 
spring morning when I had done all I could 
for those whose turn was not yet at the hospital. 
You cross a brawling stream or two, pass an 
ancient church very clean within and seeming 
holy, and ascend by a little lane to where the 
green path circles ancient fortifications of earth 
and comes at last to the vast Norman gate. 



166 STANDING BY 

Within I saw all that there was to see. This 
donjon, even to-day so massive, was never taken 
by arms ; but you can still see the bones of the 
garrison horses slaughtered at length in a vain 
attempt to keep the grimmest of invaders from 
the door, and even one poor human skeleton 
beside them who fell with none to bur}^ him be- 
fore that enemy. So this mantling ivy, these 
whispering trees, and this sunlit turf, hid still 
more flotsam of war. I make my way to the 
height of the topmost rampart and look out 
over the smiling valley to the distant hospital 
with its own little graveyard by it. The whole 
world is fair, but is there an acre not consecrate 
to the infinite pathos of our human story? 
There is a remembered battlefield yonder and 
half a hundred forgot. Unnumbered centuries 
have seen wars great and little, and every tide 
of Time has cast up on the shore wreckage that 
knew no more of the causes of the storm than 
the timbers of some broken ship can know. I 
am not sure that there was ever a storm that 
need have been, ever a timber broken untimely 
that was not broken wantonly too. And yet I 
do not know ; Almighty God is very just ; there 
are few who do not deserve the curse somehow 
or another; none, perhaps, for whom it is not 
better that they should shoulder rather than 
reject the load. But an old song rang in my 
ears as I came away, and rang in the birds* 



FLOTSAM OF WAR 167 

melody as I crossed the fields : * ' They shall not 
hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for 
the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the 
Lord, as the waters cover the sea." . . . How 
long, Lord, how long? 



XYIII 
THE CHURCH IN THE SEAECHLIGHT 

I WONDER how many times how many 
chaplains have done what I have just done 
again to-day — folded my Church news- 
paper and put it away with a sigh? Perhaps 
not so many, and yet surely there must be hun- 
dreds of priests and laymen who see, in the 
searchlight of this war, that of religious fail- 
ures in history it would be hard to find one 
more tragic and complete than the failure of 
the Established Church of England. That for 
the hundreds who see it there are thousands 
who do not, and that for the thousands who do 
not there are tens of thousands who do not take 
enough interest in a palpably worn-out insti- 
tution to think about the matter at all, only em- 
phasises the tragedy. 

For tragedy it is. The Established Church 
of England was not, on the whole, the scheme 
of fanatics or ignoramuses. Of its founders — 
considered as we know it to-day — Elizabeth was 
profoundly astute and genuinely patriotic, and 
the Elizabethan bishops, for the most part, 
grave, learned, whole-hearted men who built 

168 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 169 

determinedly because they thought their cause 
was just. Their foundation has had its all 
but saints, its all but martyrs, and very many 
sons who, upright and restrained, have shaped 
that England whose name will remain even in 
these coming days when empire, as we know 
it, will not be. Our polity owes a vast debt to 
the Church of England. The Establishment has 
bred the typical Englishman. A high code of 
honour, a grave decorum in religion, a sense of 
decent and fitting conventionalities — all these 
he has chiefly learned of it. They had their 
value in the days of limited horizons. But in 
these days it is not a high code but the right 
code, not decorum but sincerity, not conven- 
tionality but reality, that the world demands. 
The Barbarians have challenged Eome again, 
and I am not identifying the Germans with the 
Barbarians at this moment. The ultimate is- 
sue at stake is not Germany versus the Allies, 
but the New Age versus the Old. They who 
do not care two straws for manners or tradi- 
tions demand not treaties, but the Charter of 
Humanity. 

There is probably no religious instrument in 
Europe to-day less fitted than the Establish- 
ment for this condition of affairs. It is diffi- 
cult to conceive of a religious body more hope- 
lessly stranded than it. Shaped by the State 
for a policy which no longer exists, and moulded 
by considerations which no longer have weight, 



170 STANDING BY 

it is hampered but unprotected by its foster 
parent who would like to see it slain so long as 
she has not the bother and responsibility of the 
crime. For the Establishment was framed to 
unite all Englishmen in one religion suitable 
to their political isolation in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and it has been modified, definitely once 
or twice, imperceptibly down the centuries, fitly 
to express the religion of the governing edu- 
cated classes of a constitutional monarchy. To- 
day the republic is a conglomeration of diverse 
nationalities, and England herself grows more 
and more to be their international clearing sta- 
tion; indeed, she is coming to feel that that is 
her function. Power no longer rests with cer- 
tain classes ; there is not even a balance of pow- 
er between them and the rest ; there will short- 
ly not even be the classes at all. Striving, 
groaning, for fit expression and new life, the 
masses of the people are confronted in matters 
of the soul with an anaemic stranger who does 
not speak their language. They do not want 
him. If he were not so pitiably helpless, and if 
his murder did not still savour of crime, they 
would cast him out. 

There are a great many who will think that 
this is an exaggerated statement of the case, 
but I venture to suggest that it is not. In 
France to-day a padre who cares to do so can 
meet men and women of all classes who will 
speak freely enough to him. That has been my 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 171 

experience, and I wonder if I have met one who 
has had anything good to say of the religion of 
the Establishment. I have met a few extreme 
Evangelicals and a few extreme High Church- 
men, but the religion of neither of these is the 
religion of the Establishment however much 
they may be tolerated within it. I have met a 
few successful padres, and some members of 
the followings of successful padres at home, but 
in every case their success has been almost rela- 
tive to the extent to which they have thrown 
the Establishment over. I have been to some 
strikingly successful Church of England ser- 
vices, and as I write I recall them. There was 
one conducted by a Church of England padre 
and a Wesleyan which went magnificently; 
there was a most remarkable ''Sung Mass" 
parade service ; there was another with massed 
bands and a splendid choir. I have never heard 
the General Confession more strikingly and 
dramatically chanted than at this last. But the 
first two of these were not the Establishment, 
and it would be an insult to the memory of even 
the Elizabethan bishops to charge their work 
with the third. 

Of men, often nominally Anglican, who were 
inclined to think about religion, I cannot recol- 
lect one who was not contemptuous of An- 
glicanism. "When 3"0u have settled your own 
difference, you can come and talk with us. " ' ' It 
is no use talking of the Church of England, for 



172 STANDING BY 

you do not know with what you are dealing." 
*' There is no getting away from the fact that 
the Establishment does not seem to men of our 
generation in the least like the religion of 
Christ." *'I see the Bishops are squabbling 
again. Why can't they deal with things that 
matter?" *'I confess I'm not much interested 
in your religion, but Lloyd George appointing 
Hensley Henson to the apostolic succession, and 
Dean Inge preaching the sermon, strikes me as 
one of the most comic things that could possibly 
happen!" "Anyone would think it mattered 
who was Bishop of Hereford, to hear you talk, 
Padre!" Such are a handful of comments. 

One might perhaps persuade oneself that 
men such as these do not matter (although af- 
ter all they are lost sheep of the House of 
Israel), but I think the attitude of the many 
ministers of other religious bodies whom I have 
met affects me still more. The War has un- 
questionably widened our friendship. It will 
not matter to anyone, but I confess I see that 
I had no right to dismiss Presbyterians and 
Wesleyans, Congregationalists and Baptists, as 
I once did. Their religious systems do not at- 
tract me, and chiefly I wonder that they have 
wandered so far themselves from the tenets of 
their own founders, but what I have admitted 
perhaps only in theory, I now know to be a 
fact. There are true followers of Christ among 
them from whom I would learn and whose min- 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 173 

istry is blessed. What then do they say of 
the Establishment? They would destroy it, 
but they are not generally bitter about us. They 
are extraordinarily kind. Their attitude sug- 
gests that if a man has really the misfortune 
to be a minister of the Church of England, it 
would not be playing the game not to give the 
poor fellow a chance. Incredibly hampered as 
he is, to strike at him is to strike a man who is 
down. And meantime the spectacle of our 
floundering, if one can get over the pathos, is 
really most entertaining. 

And then I open my Church newspaper. I 
find that the Church of England has a function 
in the world as a centre of unity. I find enor- 
mous debates over minor modifications in the 
Book of Common Prayer. I find talk of a Na- 
tional Mission of Repentance and Hope. I find 
grave discussion as to two or three additional 
bishoprics, or as to how to reach the men. And 
these, when we are in fact radiating disunion 
from every point of the compass; when there 
is practically not a parson who does not modify 
the Book of Common Prayer, although so tenta- 
tively that his modifications irritate more than 
edify; when we no longer represent the nation 
and are the last people in the world to call any- 
one to repentance and faith ; and when it is our 
fooling with Episcopacy that has largely alien- 
ated the men. To say one rubs one's eyes, is 
not enough. Such trifling is driving some men 



174 STANDING BY 

to despair. It has already caused more than 
one whom I know humanly speaking to lose his 
soul. It is forcing me in this chapter (among 
others in other ways) to incur the odium of be- 
ing branded as an enemy within the gates for 
the term of my natural life. 

Yet if Scipio Africanus was thanked because, 
in its blackest hour, he did not despair of the 
republic, the Establishment ought to thank me ! 
For I believe that this despised Church, this 
whipping-boy of the nation, this hounded and 
all but abandoned heir of Elizabethan conven- 
tions, Georgian latitudinarianism, and Victo- 
rian priggishness, has it in her to save the mod- 
ern world, has it in her perhaps alone among 
the reformed churches to win the modern man. 
Whether or not she will do it, I do not know. 
I confess I despair more often than I hope. 
And yet my hope must transcend my despair 
or I would not be writing this. 

For the Establishment, if it has its own 
follies, has also the wisdom of all the sects. It 
is really in a position of extraordinary promise, 
for it could so easily combine the wisdom of the 
old with the freedom of the new. The incredi- 
ble and annoying thing is that it does not know 
its own power and is wilfully squandering its 
opportunities. In the mix up in France which 
has brought one into touch with so many men, 
one notices it again and again. The Salvation 
Army has power because it has behind it the 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 175 

driving force of a great dogma literally be- 
lieved and convincingly preached, but the 
Church of England has the great soul-moving 
dogmas in her hand. The Wesleyans do really 
wonderful things with their class-meetings, but 
just such machinery is to hand in the Church. 
The Presbyterians gain from the real place of 
their ministry in their communion, but Holy 
Orders cannot mean less to us. Dissent gener- 
ally does make a certain appeal from the spon- 
taneity of its services, but there is nothing really 
to stop us from doing the same. Again, the 
sentiment of familiarity with old forms and 
words is of amazing power among men, and 
whereas most religions bodies rely on hymns, 
we have them and much more to hand. Men are 
much moved by "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," 
but I have seen them equally touched by the 
Comfortable Words and the Sursum Corda. 
And lastly, the sacramental system, liturgical 
forms and symbolism, might be as effective with 
us as with the Roman Catholic Church. 

At the same time, I think there is no doubt 
that our primitive use of the vernacular, the 
greater audibility of our services (though this 
does not mean that every one of them need be 
a continuous roar of sound, as it so often is), 
and our apparently more human because mar- 
ried priesthood, is, in this age of primitive pas- 
sion and primitive religious knowledge, a dis- 
tinct advantage for the moment. I am inclined 



176 STANDING BY 

to think that a converted England would see 
their development much as converted Europe 
at one time saw their development, for they 
serve rudimentary conceptions; but it is rudi- 
mentary conceptions with which we have to 
deal to-day. Moreover, Episcopacy has nothing 
whatever to touch it as a power. Every re- 
ligious system develops bishops of a sort who 
lead congresses and direct synods and inspect 
circuits and moderate assemblies, but few have 
conceived of an office so pastoral, so Christ- 
like, and none have one so venerable. Epis- 
copacy is our final immense potentiality as it 
is our final tragic failure. 

Yet the fact that Episcopacy has not failed 
so much because of individuals who are bishops 
as because of their stultification in the Estab- 
lishment, leads on to the great point we would 
make, that the Church in England may live 
again. She has not inherently failed, nor, sure- 
ly, is her personnel unready for sacrifice that 
they may save. Knowing a few bishops from 
the inside, it is unutterably painful to hear the 
ordinary soldier speak of them. Few men in 
England have done more in this war than the 
bishops of the Church. None has the Cause of 
Freedom and love for the soldier more passion- 
ately at heart. I imagine that the college of 
bishops in England to-day would be found to 
provide more martyrs if the occasion arose than 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 177 

at any other time in the history of the Estab- 
lishment. 

And what is true of the bishops is largely 
true of the rank and file of the clergy. One 
of the most remarkable things to me is the popu- 
larity of the padre among the men. They hold 
that he has less to do than any man in the 
Army — ^he is certainly more hampered than 
any; but I notice that again and again, when 
the Church is mentioned, a man will say, **Did 
you ever know the Reverend So-and-so? He 
was the finest chap I ever met." And it is 
one's own experience. Padres, of course, are 
often dull, often stupid, often failures; but I 
do not think I have met one yet who was not 
sincere. To see such men day by day ham- 
pered in their services by a bad tradition or an 
Oxford manner or slavery to the Prayer Book, 
is painful. You go to the military church at 
some base. The padre comes in and you know 
him for a man. He opens his book and faces 
his congregation. ''Dearly beloved brethren," 
he begins, and you feel the stiffening run 
through the men. Why is he bound to use Cran- 
merese when he asks his fellow-sinners to ac- 
knowledge our common guilt 1 It is liturgiology 
run riot. This is, of course, one straw, but 
straws broke the camel's back. 

But with such material it ought to be pos- 
sible for the Church to burst the grave-clothes 
and sweep our generation for Christ as I be- 



178 STANDING BY 

lieve she miglit well do. Remember, desperale 
diseases require desperate remedies. Let us 
remember also that our age is about to see des- 
perate remedies applied to desperate diseases 
other than that of religion, and that it is in 
the mood to welcome them. We are on the 
crest of the wave if we talk of revolt. And let 
us talk. 

Eound many mess-fires I have come to the 
conclusions that I set out here, and they may 
for that reason be entitled to a certain consid- 
eration. They are not arm-chair remedies. For 
the most part, they are general specifics, and I 
am inclined to think that if we dared to act on 
one or two principles, everything else would go 
by default. 

Pay, in the Church, must be placed on the 
old apostolic footing of a recognition of neces- 
sity and not of a reward. The Christian priest 
must be free to live if he is to work, but he 
must be free from a suspicion of wealth if he 
is to save souls. He must be free to live; he 
must not expect to enjoy luxuries or ease. He 
is entitled, as everyone else who labours, to 
meat and bread; he must renounce the chance 
of profiteering so as to obtain game and wine. 
Two hundred pounds a year ^"ill keep a man in 
health and decency — indeed, many a workman 
enjoys both on less. If the Church organised 
for war on this basis ; if the clergy deliberately 
accepted for themselves the standard which is 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 179 

thought sufficient for men as good as they; if 
they submitted even their children to the edu- 
cation and culture which the State offers to 
such; and if for the rest — for the necessity of 
breeding ''gentlemen" and for marrying 
"ladies" — they put their trust in God, I be- 
lieve the nation would be stung to life. When 
I say clergy, I mean bishops and all the higher 
ranks as well. It is inconceivably wrong that 
Episcopacy should be held to demand a higher 
standard of life than that of the respectable, 
decent working-man. If Episcopacy is the apos- 
tolate, there must be no suspicion that its re- 
wards are material. I admit that if the world 
were sincerely Christian, it is incredible that 
it should not insist on its bishops being its 
princes, just as it is impossible to imagine that, 
in a Christian community, the King would not 
vacate his palace if our Lord returned to earth 
■ — ^whatever He might do in the matter. But 
the world is not sincerely Christian ; it does not 
acclaim bishops as its princes; and in conse- 
quence bishops must be as they were in the 
days of Peter and Paul. 

Probably all this will read as the veriest 
moonshine, but in the name of God, why, why? 
Every diocese must have its organisation, its 
staff office, and it would be absurd in these days 
that that should not be fitted with telephones 
and served by motor-cars. But the bishop need 
not have personal possession of these things. 



180 STANDING BY 

Travelling allowances, probably, lie must have ; 
entertaining, too, for the poor and for those 
who need to consult him, or retreat with him, at 
that communal centre, the bishop's palace. 
"Palace" is just the name for the great home 
wherein the poor pastor entertains the poor. 
But if Thomas a Becket were a poor man in 
Lambeth, why not a modern archbishop? 

Experiments have been suggested perhaps 
rather than made in this direction. There is 
the case of the Bishop of London's offer, and 
of the Bradford Bishopric scheme. That exact- 
ly brings us to the crux of the whole matter, 
that these things, constantly spoken of, urgently 
needed, widely recognised, are not done. The 
Establishment is so bound down that it cannot 
move. But there is a way of overcoming even 
a Gordian knot. String was wasted in that 
process, and, by the same token, more than one 
millionaire claims to have made himself by not 
wasting such things as lengths of string. But 
the Church is already a millionaire, and it does 
not need to be. We have thousands to gamble 
with. No scheme of disendowment would beg- 
gar us beyond these possibilities, and disen- 
dowment would be a light price to pay. 

And then there are the grave-clothes: one 
smiles to think of them. How terrible it would 
be if a bishop sent in his resignation to nine- 
tenths of his vice-presidencies, and with them 
cut out as many of his committees, abandoned 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 181 

his progress-confirmations, and abjured his 
formal preachings I If he put on his boots and 
took a penny bus, and dropped in to one of his 
churches and talked to his people unexpectedly, 
and shook hands with them afterwards ! If in- 
stead of telling us to pray for a large number 
of varied ends, and then reading the old prayer 
of the Church Militant, he was in the habit of 
praying extemporarily at that place! Surely 
an apostle would have done so. If he did not 
wait for letters of business and Acts of Parlia- 
ment, but reformed the Prayer Book of his dio- 
cese on his own authority ! It would indeed be 
terrible — terrible as an army with banners. 
The people would believe in miracles again, for 
behold, these dry bones live! I have not the 
faintest idea what the Establishment would do, 
thoii^h I expect it would collapse under the 
strain, and I am perfectly certain that there 
would be all kinds of mistakes made, aU sorts 
of liturgical indecencies committed, all sorts 
of conventions outraged. I well believe the 
very foundations of Society would move, and 
that the world would actually be turned upside 
down again. Of course both those things will 
shortly come to pass, but it would be a return 
to the days of the Apostles and not to the age 
of the Barbarians, if religion brought them 
about. 

Incidentally, of course, we should have to 
have more bishops. One for every town or dis- 



182 STANDING BY 

trict of two hundred thousand souls is about 
the proportion required. Since almost everj'' 
town or district in England has at least one liv- 
ing worth £400 a year, since the equalisation of 
all clerical stipends and the sharing of parochial 
incomes and expenses would give a big margin, 
there is no financial reason why this episcopal 
increase should not come about. Nor is there 
any ecclesiastical reason. Prime Ministers do 
not make bishops, nor do Acts of Parliament. 
Eesolution on the part of the present episcopate 
could give us our religious revolution in six 
months, and it w^ould be delightful to see the 
Church disestablish itself by the simple method 
of consecrating to the episcopate without the 
mandate of the State. It would be quite mad, 
quite apostolic. Adjustment would be the 
State's worry, not ours, and I do not think 
the State would worry much. It would free the 
Church and take the greater part of the spoils 
quite readily. And then the Church would come 
into the Kingdom of the Lord Christ. 

Eemote and impossible as it all sounds, I 
write in a land where such things have largely 
come to pass. The Church in France is all but 
penniless. It is not merely disestablished ; it is 
— or has been till the heroism of its clergy in 
the War moved the secret soul of the nation 
— even persecuted. There are bishops in 
France with a curate's stipend and a Third- 
Floor-Back Palace. And the result? Francois 



THE CHURCH IN THE SEARCHLIGHT 183 

not strikingly religious ; indeed, it is strikingly- 
pagan, for broad is the way and wide is the 
gate that leadeth to destruction; and narrow 
is the way and strait is the gate that leadeth 
into life. But the churches are full. The poor 
have the gospel preached to them. The pure 
in heart see God. The lepers are often cleansed, 
and even the lame walk and the blind see. And 
no one says to a French priest: "Don't talk 
to me of the Church in France. No one knows 
for what the Church in France stands. Let 
your Church live like Christ before it preaches 
Him. ' ' For one knows for what the Church in 
France stands; one knows that its clergy are 
despised and rejected and poor as He; and if 
Christ be still crucified in France to-day, there 
are centurions at the foot of His Cross who 
are moved to cry, ''Truly this Man is the Son 
of God.'^ 



XIX 

ROME 

FIRST, a little story. 
In this camp of 2000 boys from South 
Africa, in addition to Church of Eng- 
land, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, 
French Protestant, Zionist, Salvation Army, 
Wesleyan Methodist, Dutch Reformed, and (at 
least two) Seventh Day Adventist native Chris- 
tians, there are some seventy Roman Catholics. 
For all but these we cater spiritually. Even I, 
although carefully fencing round the adminis- 
tration of the Sacraments to my boys, take my 
turn in the conducting of somewhat varied 
services in which we can all unite, chiefly be- 
cause — at least so it strikes me — there is noth- 
ing very definite about them. As for the Sacra- 
ments of the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, 
Baptist, French Protestant, Zionist, Salvation 
Army, Wesleyan Methodist, Dutch Reformed, 
and Seventh Day Adventist, which, if everyone 
will promise not to be hurt, for it is not meant 
in the least unkindly, we might hereinafter call 
^'the Band," after the never-dying example 
of the churchwarden who, following two or three 
attempts, abandoned the task of repeating all 

184 



ROME 185 

the musical instniments of the third chapter of 
Daniel when reading that passage as a lesson 
— as for these, I say, they all join happily and 
holily in one for the ministrations of my two 
devoted colleagues of the Wesleyan Methodist 
and Congregationalist bodies respectively. 
Thus, despite my exclusiveness in some matters 
(my sorely worried conscience being unheard) 
we attain to a measure of unison, and certainly 
to much affection. In short, one might almost 
say that there would be no flies in the oint- 
ment of the apothecary if it were not for those 
seventy Eoman Catholics. They have no priest ; 
they get no Sacraments; they tremble on the 
edge of our common but to them forbidden de- 
votions like bathers on the brink of the Serpen- 
tine in mid-winter. They feel that it is all but 
colder out than in. 

These things gave sincere trouble both to 
myself and my brethren of the Band; nor did 
we rest under them day or night. We informed 
the official Chaplains' Department on both sides 
of the House (the A.P.C. and the A.C.G.) ; not 
once nor twice I bestirred myself to see if I 
could not conduct them to a local French Mass, 
and might have succeeded if it had not been 
for circumstances over which neither I nor the 
authorities have power ; and finally, in despera- 
tion, I announced that I would say the Eosary 
for them and for such of my boys who were used 
to it, once on Sunday and once in the week, com- 



186 STANDING BY 

mencing the following Sunday. It proved to 
be the finally effective thing, effective doubtless 
under Divine Providence, for I do not see how 
the Roman Catholic powers could have heard 
of my intention; but immediately there was a 
sudden intervention, and on this wise. 

My own Sabbath Mass had been said for my 
own boys at 5 a.m., and I was back in my cubicle 
considering how soon the light of the pearly 
dawn would permit me to shave (as the devil 
had broken my electric light bulb the night be- 
fore), when my native padre tapped on my 
door and threw in a bombshell. ''There is a 
Eoman priest here. Father," he said, ''waiting 
to say Mass." I slipped on my collar and coat 
and hastened out. 

Now, for a priest so to blow in to a camp like 
ours to say Mass, especially when he has an 
engagement elsewhere an hour later, is to tempt 
Providence. We are a big camp and a cramped 
camp, and we send out gangs by day and by 
night. Where his Reverence expected to say 
Mass, how he expected to gather a congrega- 
tion from boys sleeping, or eating, or arriving, 
or departing, or falling in, or falling out, or 
lounging about, or digesting either supper or 
dinner or breakfast, as the case might be, espe- 
cially seeing that he knew no Sesuto, had no as- 
sistant, and was even without a bell; and what 
he expected to find, I cannot tell. My impres- 
sion is that he was a true Evangelical and took 



ROME 187 

no anxious thought. But as my experience has 
been, in these circumstances, that if you do not 
take that anxious thought first, you take it af- 
terwards, I hurried to his assistance. 

It was therefore my cook-house, extorted by 
me from the Camp Commandant even with 
tears, and fitted by me at great expense, with 
crucifix, hangings, candles, flowers, images, and 
kneelers, that he used. It was our native 
Church of England padre who gathered his 
boys, and, since the greater number were out, 
made up a welcoming congregation of our own 
Catholic-minded faithful, and it was he also 
who selected the server. It was I who, when 
the server broke down, took charge of the bell 
by means of which the Basuto, dazed by the 
so sudden apparition of a priest of their own 
Church, alone recovered their wits and real- 
ised their way about the service and answered 
the Mass, and it was I who instructed the son 
of a chief there present to lead them in the de- 
votions to which they were accustomed in 
Basutoland, and to sing a hymn. A Eoman 
Catholic white officer, seeing his Reverence 
arrive, was present, but when an appeal was 
made to him to say if the boys were prepared 
for Communion, it was I who had to furnish 
the information that they were not. In a word, 
I believe it was the efforts of the Band that had, 
under Providence, got him there, and certainly 
it was the efforts of the Church of England that 



188 STANDING BY 

prevented him going away empty. Yet for none 
of these things did we obtain any blessing from 
the Church. For brotherliness we received a 

stone ; for gratitude No, I wrong him. He 

did nod once in my direction and jerk out 
' ' Thanks, ' ' stony-eyed. 

It was natural, therefore, that I should re- 
turn to my cubicle and meditate the while I 
cut myself shaving in the hurry not now to be 
late for breakfast ; and it is natural that I should 
be discoursing on paper. For if ever I have had 
to stand by in this War, it was this morning. 
The Church, tardy but persistent and un- 
changed, had swept in, using my gate and path 
and tools, and even the children of my house- 
hold ; had garnered of its own ; had regally as- 
signed to me my part. I could stand by — or 
not, as I pleased. Maybe even this infallible 
Church did not know how used I had grown to 
that, nor to what profit I might put it. . . . 

What strikes one first, then, again, is the 
magnificent testimony of the Church of Rome 
to the inviolability of Truth. Not even the 
shoc]j: of an unparalleled world-war can shake 
that witness. I have heard stories of conces- 
sions, but they have certainly been very much 
in part, and they give no more sign of gen- 
erally breaking down this resolution than an 
occasional fall of chalk indicates the abolition 
of the cliffs of Dover. No truck with heretics 
because of the holiness and undividedness of 



ROME 189 

Truth — that is the attitude. And whatever else 
we say, let us express our enormous obligation 
for such testimony. Looking back over the last 
three centuries, how, if it had not been for 
Rome, should we still have had a voice amongst 
us to say that Truth and Purity are sisters! 
That if a doctrine is a revelation of the mind 
of Christ, neither death nor life, nor angels, 
nor principalities, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor 
depth, nor any other creature, must be allowed 
to separate from it — this is her agelong wit- 
ness. It is magnificent. It is almost incredible. 
It is all but a final proof of her divine claim, for 
unquestionably it is a rock upon which one 
dashes oneself to pieces or by which one is 
ground to powder. 

The question, of course, is how far Charity 
ought to be a solvent, in which connection, tak- 
ing our microcosm here as an example not un- 
truly representative of greater things, the sol- 
vent has made no impression at all on the rock 
in the case of Rome, has had a very considerable 
impression on the Church of England, and has 
done wonders for the Band. In the case of the 
latter, indeed, one is tempted to ask if there 
is any of the rock left, except perhaps in solu- 
tion. To continue the metaphor, it may be that 
what is wanted, and what is about to come, will 
be a fresh and better precipitation of truth. 
Those who hold so, would assert that the sooner 



190 STANDING BY 

we dissolve what is left of the rock among our- 
selves, the sooner that precipitation is likely 
to take place. They would even, for the good 
of our souls, place us over the Bunsen burner, 
for which reason, it is said, Eome once placed 
men over the fires of Smithfield. So do ex- 
tremes meet. 

But the problem is not quite so easily solved. 
As true metal is untouched by the acid, so 
Truth cannot be diminished by Charity, and we 
are really only brought up again against the 
question as to whether any among us have all 
the truth, or a few among us some of the truth, 
or none among us any of the truth; as to 
whether any among us have no dross, a few 
among us but little dross, or some among us 
nothing but dross. I take it that the Church 
of England is chiefly insistent that we all have 
some gold and some dross. It worries her. 
Members of the Band, it seems to me, are less 
worried because largely convinced that they 
have very little dross and that Rome has very 
little gold. But I wish we all admitted more 
freely that no one sets the true value on gold 
more resolutely and unflinchingly than Rome. 
No other Communion would sooner her children 
went unfed by ministries at all than be fed by 
any other than her own ; no other would receive 
so much at our hands as she did this morning, 
and yet still maintain unfalteringly that we 
were nothing but heretics and without the Fold. 



ROME 191 

But, secondly, this morning's service was 
really an amazing illustration of Catholicity. 
There is no getting away from it. Consider 
what that priest did. Knowing nothing of na- 
tives whatever, and utterly unable to speak a 
word of their language, he walks in as cool as 
you please, and is able to provide them with a 
service which (as they testified and as I could 
hear) they enjoyed immensely, and which I have 
no doubt uplifted them. I imagine myself in a 
like situation. I should have begun by fussing 
about hymn-books, looking for an interpreter, 
and so on. I remember once in a camp being 
in just the same position, and I remember how 
utterly things failed. Nor is it any use to say 
that any use of a liturgy would obviate this. 
Our liturgical practice does not. Partly, no 
doubt, owing to our different uses, but partly 
because in our Holy Communion emphasis is 
laid on language, and the language of the 
Prayer Book at that, the vast majority of our 
boys would have been lost in such a situation. 
A strange priest and a foreign language would 
bewilder them. I have proved it and I know. 
Of course boys trained in very High Church 
circles are different, or should be ; but there are 
few of our missions which teach as the Romans 
teach, and all but none who face the possibili- 
ties and the consequences of Catholicity, and 
educate for it, as they do. In consequence, 
these Kaffirs could attend the Mass of a foreign 



192 STANDING BY 

priest at a moment's notice, and understand 
what was done. 

And then there was that other slight point; 
the white officer came to Mass with them. I 
will not say that there are no white men who 
will go to our services with natives, for that 
would not be true ; but our normal custom is to 
have two services, one English and one native, 
one white and one black, and their normal cus- 
tom is to have but one. It never enters their 
heads to question it; it rarely enters ours to 
suggest it. Last Sunday I had fifty boys at 
5 a.m. and thirty more at 6, and five white men 
at 8.15. I have seen the same thing all round 
Africa, at Zanzibar, Cape Town, Sierra Leone, 
and Port Said. One may talk around it, seek 
to pooh-pooh it, or object to it, but the fact is 
that that Catholic altar this morning trans- 
cended in a moment, without premeditation, and 
as a normal thing which I do not suppose even 
arrested the attention of priest or people, black 
or white, all bounds of distance, of colour, and 
of caste. And this is a wonderful witness 
among us at this time. For the Cross alone 
does this. The Cross of the battlefield anni- 
hilates all barriers, as we have seen these days 
a hundred times, and so does the Cross of the 
Eoman Catholic altar. 

I had got so far in my meditations when there 
dawned on me another thought. True, Eome 
has her laurels, but the Church of England, 



ROME 193 

might she not fairly claim some too ? The Band 
is proud of its charity, but I doubt if any other 
than the Anglican Church would have furnished 
a minister capable of and willing to assist at a 
Eoman Mass at 7 a.m., and conduct an interde- 
nominational service at 10. If my brothers 
helped to bring that priest to the door, they did 
not follow him in, and they would not have been 
of much use if they had. I did, and I have 
brought them to other doors before now, and 
followed them in. Yet if this be charity, God 
knows, on the other hand, that we hold to Truth 
in our own way. We are generally black- 
guarded for fencing our Table, and for exclu- 
siveness. I do, here, insist on Sacraments, and 
Sacraments first. Neither side understands, 
and both despises us. Some even hate, but most 
the rather mock. We play fast and loose with 
Truth, says Eome; we are absurdly dogmatic, 
say the others. Our charity is no true char- 
ity but a weakness, says Eome, for we pander 
to heretics ; our charity is a backboneless thing, 
say the others, for we will not act upon it. Both 
cast us out. It is perfectly true : the Church of 
England, seemingly too weak to stand the next 
blow, is isolated and alone in Christendom. It 
was that loneliness that first laid chill fingers 
on Monsignor Benson's eager heart as it has 
on many another, and relief still seems very 
far. 
I lifted my eyes. On a shelf in my room 



194 STANDING BY 

stands a plaster figure. The Saviour, bent of 
back and burdened with His Cross till He is like 
to fall, moves utterly forsaken down the Tia 
Dolorosa. I looked at it very long, and never 
do I remember to have been so cheered. Every 
Communion of faithful people who try to fol- 
low Him doubtless manifest some aspect of the 
Christ, and to some may fall the high and noble 
share. But if, in our very hopelessness, the 
Lord Christ hold out to us, because at least we 
try to be faithful to the vision that we have, 
the vocation to manifest His loneliness and His 
shame, why, then, we will drag our weary feet 
even to Calvary with song in our hearts and 
light in our eyes. 



XX 

CONTRASTS 

NOTHING has been more striking dur- 
ing tliis year of standing by and 
watching the great drama of life than 
the contrasts it displays. Tragedy and com- 
edy have ever jostled each other, but when each 
is linked with death, and set out naked before 
one's eyes, one sees the spectacle as God must 
see it. Then it ceases to be a wonder that an- 
gels weep, and devils tremble ; it is no longer a 
cause for marvel that God should have sought 
a Virgin's womb and a felon's cross. There is 
in human nature that commands even these. 

It was a late November evening that I was 
hurrying home from the hospital, and to make a 
short cut to the tram, traversed some back 
streets little known to me. The cobbles of the 
roadway were set thick with filthy, black, oozy 
mud, and the pavements were slimed with it. 
The water of the quayside scarcely stirred at 
all, and when it did, there was a sound as if fat 
evil lips sucked at the stone. A light drizzle 
fell, and brought down soot from the upper air, 
begriming one 's face and hands, streaking again 

195 



196 STANDING BY 

the gloomy, ugly, squalid houses of the mod- 
ern town. Occasional gas lamps, half obscured, 
shone fitfully on the new mud splashes thrown 
up from the road by passing cars on their 
standards and on the walls of the footway. At 
the corner I was bespattered from head to foot. 
Yet one of the streets was busy, with a busi- 
ness that made me so nearly physically sick that 
I was glad to leave the path and walk in the 
middle of the road. Every house had a street- 
door wide open that revealed interiors of hor- 
ror. It was not merely that garish ornaments, 
sacred oleograph pictures in such surround- 
ings, soiled linen, and tumbled beds were ugly 
beyond words, but the poor soul that waited in 
each, or sat in the doorway, or lounged out on 
the pavement, lent herself to the creation of an 
atmosphere no less than devilish. They dif- 
fered, and yet they were all alike. Some were 
garishly dressed, others more slatternly; some 
with tumbling hair, attractive in its way, others 
with horrible nondescript-coloured coils hur- 
riedly and carelessly wound together with a 
certainty that they would not be required to 
stay up long; some young, slim, and not bad 
looking in a coarse way, others fleshy and over- 
painted ; some with low-cut blouses, others with 
bodices half-fastened and breasts all but ex- 
posed. But all were alike in one way. Gay, 
bold, brazen, they used the lure of the highest 
to tempt to the lowest, and dared to call lust, 



CONTRASTS 197 

love. If there was one such in the short street, 
there were twenty. 

But towards the end, the houses gave way to 
low-windowed murky shops, selling God knows 
what, and all but at the corner flared a window 
gaily lit, from behind which came loud voices. 
As I passed, and in the instant of my drawing 
abreast of it, a door swung open and a man 
pitched out. A burst of sound followed him; 
oaths, a querulous complaint, a rattle of gay 
laughter, if it was laughter that could be so 
harsh. On hands and knees the man came 
down, fell sideways, and rolled into the gutter, 
where, in a trickle of ooze and a mass of slime, 
he lay still. The door was banged to. A girl 
of thirteen or so, smiling eagerly, and two or 
three young children, crossed towards us to 
look on. 

I moved to the gutter and seized the man, 
pulling at his arms to get him upon his feet. 
He stirred and raised himself a little, so that 
the light of the yellow window fell upon him. 
It was a boy's face that looked at me, deadly 
white despite the streaks of filth, and his curly 
hair was matted with the mud. It was the 
King's uniform that he wore, and there were 
badges of rank on his shoulder straps. He 
wiped blood from his lips with the back of a 
bleeding hand, but he looked up at me with eyes 
still reasonable and burning with the horror of 



198 STANDING BY 

knowledge. ''Oh, my God," he exclaimed, *'is 
this Helir' 

Against that I set a village street. We had 
halted the car for lunch, and eaten it in the small 
parlour of an inn still served hy a woman de- 
spite the all but continuous thunder of the guns 
not far away. Occasionally there was a louder 
crash near at hand, for they were intermittenly 
shelling the road and the place. I stood by the 
table, for there was not another chair, and ate 
an assorted meal of pate de foie gras spread 
thickly on Bath Oliver biscuits, cheese, choco- 
late, French bread, and beer. My friend of the 
Y.M.C.A. and the two Red Cross people shared 
a chair and a bench. We ate quickly, for it was 
not a healthy locality. For all that, there was 
traffic in the street, big motor-waggons, an oc- 
casional swift car, the clatter of horse-hoofs, a 
good many rather slow-moving Tommies. Our 
car stood outside the door, and the driver, who 
had finished his meal with us but now, was tin- 
kering at her. I could see him through the 
glassless window as I stood. 

Suddenly there was an explosion so near that 
my tumbler crashed from my hand and I invol- 
untarily covered my face. Dead silence fell on 
the four of us. When I looked up, the chauffeur 
was leaning against the bonnet of his car, wip- 
ing the blood from his face, which had been cut 
by a flying splinter of glass, and staring through 



CONTRASTS 199 

what had been the wind-screen down the street. 
"Anyone hit?" I called. 

He glanced back and nodded. I ran out. 
There was a pistol shot as I left the door. 

A motor-lorry had been hit. I wonder if I 
can describe it. A smashed chaotic mass lay 
in the middle of the road, one wheel still spin- 
ning in the air, smoke wreaths drifting round 
the canvas body. Blood had splashed the whole 
far side of the street, and a man who had 
propped himself up against the wall and was 
holding his head in his hands ; and blood lay in 
a big pool and trickled towards the gutter. 
Farther along, an orderly had been holding a 
horse; he was uninjured, but the Colonel, who 
had hurried out, still held the smoking pistol of 
mercy in his hand. But amongst the debris of 
the waggon, where he had been blown by the ex- 
plosion, half hidden from me by a rapidly form- 
ing little group, lay the figure of central inter- 
est in the picture. And over the dull half- 
wrecked street was a grey sky, and a heavy 
moist air that was already polluted even to the 
door of the inn. 

They made way for me when I said I was a 
chaplain, but two men were already bending 
over the body when I reached it, for by good 
fortune a doctor and a priest were both near. 
As I arrived the former stood up, with a drawn 
face and a manner which said he could do noth- 
ing. Then I saw that from his waist down- 



200 STANDING BY 

wards the poor fellow was mangled untellably, 
but that his ashen face was alive, and that his 
lips were gasping. The good father was al- 
ready saying something quickly but firmly, and 
I arrested my motion of kneeling down when I 
saw him sign the lad, whose own hands were 
powerless, with the cross. 

It was all over in a few seconds, thank God. 
The three or four of us about heard the two 
half-articulated names. ''Jesus, Mary!" he 
cried, and, as I live to write it, smiled, and 
passed. The priest got to his feet; he was a 
little man. "Sure," he said, with tears in his 
eyes, "the boy had no need to die to enter 
heaven." 

I have seen little of war, but I wonder some- 
times if our Lord gave me these two pictures, 
each so complete, with more than me in His 
mind. 



XXI 

KINDERGAETEN RELIGION 

I. Philip 

HERE, where factories on all sides and 
a dozen tugs on the canal belch out 
smuts continually, I remember it as a 
preternaturally beautiful day and another 
world. Our air, 6000 feet up in the Drakens- 
berg, is stainless and invigorating, and the sun 
we know shines on great wind-cooled spaces of 
veld and mountain like the love of God. Cir- 
cling half the horizon from the Camp, grassy 
slope and rocky krantz on the distant Malutis 
are still undefiled, and I sometimes think the 
wide lands at their base, through which flow the 
silver rivers, have the atmosphere of holy 
ground. Even in the Camp the grey aloe and 
the dark pine and the brown huts have a qual- 
ity all their own, and in the garden, among the 
hardy flowers or under the fruit trees, with the 
vista of kopjes showing through the blue-gums, 
I have sometimes stood still awhile in sheer de- 
light with life. 

So it was on the morning following the late 
arrival of the fateful letter. I had it in my 

/201 



202 STANDING BY 

hand as I went over to church, for I meant to 
read it there, and none of the brown folk knew 
as yet of the contents. The wide space before 
the church, between our garden and the Sis- 
ters', was dotted with them as I crossed it. 
From the bench under the young oak by the far 
wall the elders called their greeting; by the 
sacristy door the boys were already waiting me, 
merry and very friendly; and although the 
church is iron-roofed and earth-floored, and you 
would not call my sacristy beautiful, still I felt 
sad at heart as I went through to vest for the 
service. 

There was a full church that morning, and I 
felt inclined to linger over the Sesuto words I 
have come so speedily to love, or to stop and try 
to store more firmly the little vivid vignettes of 
the service — Sam's grave face and incongruous 
boots as he handled the incense, Philip's nerv- 
ous responses, Peter's ready understanding and 
mastery of his singing. But sermon-time came 
all too soon. I let them sit down, and then I 
told them : the Bishop v/ished me to go with the 
Basuto to France. 

Some white people hate to hear that a priest 
loves his black folk, and still more find it hard 
to believe. At one time I, too, used to dislike 
the man who made too much of it — it seemed so 
much like affectation; but I cannot help it, I 
love mine. That morning, as I went on to speak 
briefly (yet once more) of the War, and why the 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 203 

Basuto were asked to help, and why I was glad 
to go, I took them in, row by row, as they sat so 
silently staring at me. There were the little 
children, clustered about the pulpit steps and 
sitting below the figure of the Good Shepherd, 
even they gravely understanding and very 
sorry ; behind them the elder girls of the Guild 
of the Children of Mary — the girls one strives 
to keep merry and bright and native, while all 
the while a cursed civilisation and the Devil 
seek to drag them away; and behind them, 
again, the black mass of the women on the floor 
and crossing the whole vacant space at the back 
of the church — the women whose ignorance is 
my despair nine days out of ten, and whose 
faithfulness my delight on the other. 

Coming back up the other side were first the 
ranks of men, upon whom our hold is weakest — 
men one has to win — and then some rows of 
white-haired or at least older fathers — the 
staunch old Zulu, the burly ex-policeman who 
shot two rebels with his own hand at my gar- 
den gate in the Gun War, and poor old blind 
Zachariah, who seems to me sometimes even 
now to see the King in His beauty — to name a 
few of them. Still nearer, younger men and 
boys, and all around me in the sanctuary is the 
band^ who serve on earth our Lord's Majesty 
and seem to begin to feel the honour of it. And 
so I told my going. 

* Practically all of these have served in France. 



204! STANDING BY 

But it is of one of these latter that I want to 
write. The service was over, and I unvesting 
and putting away the chalice. As I left the 
sacristy he was standing at the door, waiting 
to speak with me. 

''What is it, Philip?" I asked. 

" I go with the father, ' ' he said. ' ' When is it 
that we must leave?" He spoke just as 
abruptly as that. 

' ' But, Philip, ' ' I said, ' ' you can 't ! Think of 
your wife and your first baby only a month 
old! What will she say? And I don't know 
that I can keep you near me. Also, it is a very 
far journey: are you not afraid?" 

He looked up at me and smiled nervously. 
''Wherever the father goes, I go," he said con- 
clusively and very simply. 

I was very glad. I had not thought that, in 
my late days, I would meet with that old devo- 
tion which democracy, even in black Africa, is 
fast killing, and I knew he would be very use- 
ful. I could trust him absolutely with all that 
I possessed; and slow as he is in some ways, 
and dull in others, he is a boy who never com- 
plains, and who will set out with a sack to col- 
lect the scattered liso at sunset after a nine 
hours ' march without a word, even if it is rain- 
ing and very cold — and I know no praise higher 
than that. But what an adventure for him! 
He had never been so much as to Johannesburg. 
He was newly married, very happy, very con- 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 205 

tent witli his land and beasts and son. Yet 
lie would leave all and go out blindly to the end 
of the earth after me. 

''Philip," I said, ''I am very glad, but we 
must ask your wife first." He smiled enig- 
matically. 

The circle of huts of his family stand on the 
veld high up on the rounded hill up which the 
road runs from Camp, and you can see over the 
Caledon far into the Free State, as well as right 
across our bit of Basutoland, from there. A 
rectangle of aloes shuts in the orchard and the 
half-dozen huts which lie in a semicircle facing 
north, and on that side there is a low turf wall 
also. Philip and I passed in through the gap. 
The old father came forward at once, old, but 
straight and finely built and unashamed, his 
face beaming his welcome, courteous yet hum- 
ble, one of the finest native Christians I have 
ever met and one of Nature's gentlemen. He 
and I stood talking while Philip dived into a hut 
and came out presently with his wife, a well- 
made, tall girl, good-looking, unspoilt, but well 
taught. She speaks capital English, and so it 
was in English that I spoke. 

''You know," said I, addressing both her and 
the old man, ' ' that I am to go to France. I told 
you of it in church this morning. Now, Philip 
says that he wishes to go with me, and although 
I wish it very much, I would rather he asked 
y,ou before he decides. He will be away at least 



206 STANDING BY 

a year; he will run considerable danger; but 
he will be serving his King — and his God. 
"What do you say?" 

Clearly the girl had not expected it, and she 
stood dumb. Then she looked down at the babe 
in her arms and then up at her husband. Re- 
member, she was a native woman, and she was 
being asked to allow her husband to go into the 
unknown for a period that seems endless to na- 
tives as to children. Her face clouded and she 
burst into tears. 

We stood silently, the old father with a queer 
look on his face. But it was he who spoke first. 
''You have not spoken," he said. 

At that she turned to me. "Let him go," she 
said, "but, oh, Father, protect him," and, turn- 
ing, she dived from sight into the hut. 

The old man took a prodigious pinch of snuff. 
"Ho!" he said contemptuously, "the women of 
our people are not as I knew them. In the old 
days, when the King called the young men to 
battle, their women leapt with joy that they 
should serve, and sang if they came not back, 
forasmuch as they had died for their King! 
Ho ! The women of our days are children and 
water!" 

"But she said he could go," said I. 

"But with tears," he retorted. "Wliy 
should she weep? He is honoured; let him go. 
No, no," he grumbled; "our women are not as 
they once were ! ' ' 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 207 

He exaggerated a little, I think, but the old 
fighting spirit thrilled one. Neither he nor 
Philip looked back from that attitude, even on 
the last morning. It was a Tuesday, and the 
church was packed while I offered the Sacrifice 
for the guardianship of the Holy Angels, just 
as we offer daily at our little side-altar of Our 
Lady. They knelt all around me, the black 
folk, and right back, filling the church, and 
afterwards they waited for me to go to the door 
and shake hands with each. But then native 
passion let itself go. The tears of the women 
soaked my hand as they bent, again and again, 
despite all that I could do, to kiss it, and even 
the men were not dry-eyed. And when they 
were all out, Philip and I walked over to the 
Rectory in the clear, bright sun silently; but I 
vowed, before the God who hears in the silence, 
that I would come back to these the people He 
had given me, if He permitted, though the com- 
ing meant almost the renunciation of national- 
ity. Better than honours, better than riches, 
better than the fellowship of England, is the 
treasure I had seen that day. 

2. At Evening Time 

The first batch of my own boys had been in 
France nine months before I found them again. 
I had had letters, but the native letter does not 
tell you much ; it usually says that the writer is 



208 STANDING BY 

going to tell you everything when he sees you, 
and will you please keep his job open for him. 
They took, indeed, a good deal of finding, for 
in France one does not usually know where 
one's own brother is. One writes A.P.O. X. 25, 
or something of that sort, and sends the letter 
out into the blue without the least idea where 
X. 25 may be. So I have written A.P.O. S. 1 
for a long time, and finally by chance discovered 
what S. 1 meant. After that it was easy. I 
went there, on duty, but the boys did not know 
I was coming. 

Somewhere, then, in the north of France is a 
little town by the banks of a small but swift 
river, as famous now as any in Europe, where 
the nave of a great church, which was planned 
but never completed, lifts — or used to lift — 
twin towers, of the style of Rouen and Amiens, 
over quaint houses, and, for the most part, nar- 
row, old-fashioned streets. My cattle-truck on 
the troop-train in which, destitute of even straw 
for a bed, I had passed the night rolled grum- 
bling to a halt outside the station while the day 
was still young, but the Camp was a dozen or 
more kilometres out of the to^vn. So I spent 
that sunny day of early autumn poking around 
the canal and the precincts of the church until, 
in late afternoon, the motor-waggon put in an 
appearance which was to carry me on. Riding 
out through the gathering dusk, the country was 
strangely reminiscent of Cambridge. The rich 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 209 

water-meadows and the little thickets of trees 
and the half-hidden villages lay still and sweet- 
scented as they lie in the valley of the Granta. 
There is something about that damp, clean, 
earthy smell which a man can love with all his 
heart. It is a primitive kind of smell. One 
belongs to it. 

So, at evening time, we climbed the hill to the 
notice-board on the tree which tells you that 
here is a camp of negro workers and you must 
not loiter. It lay to the right of the road, and 
the ground slopes down to the river, and rises, 
across the water, to a forest whose black out- 
line lies along the skyline — a skyline lit at night 
about that time with the flashes of distant guns. 
The boys' compound lay among the trees and 
fields, and seemed a hundred times more suited 
to the boys of veld and berg than the smoke of 
big towns. At once I sought out the padre, and 
found that the daily evening services were about 
to begin. There were two held daily, one in 
Sesuto, one in Zulu. The Zulu used the little 
church ; the Basuto met, I was told, in one of the 
big huts. I seized the opportunity. I would 
go alone and unannounced, I said, and see how 
my boys were conducting themselves. 

The huts, big things taking forty boys in 
each, were in long avenues, and I asked my way 
among them. I was directed to a hut at the 
end of one, and knew it for the place by the 
sound of singing as I drew near. At the door 



210 STANDING BY 

I paused and looked through the window. And 
there I stood until the last hymn. 

This is what I saw. A swinging lantern at 
one end gave light to the conductor. I recog- 
nised him. He was one of my own catechists 
who had enlisted as a labourer and remained a 
private all the time. But day by day he had 
gathered the Basuto of the Camp for prayer, 
unpaid, unordered. I saw him many times 
afterwards, wandering through the Camp, ring- 
ing his little bell, like a Francis Xavier through 
the streets of Goa. And there he stood, in his 
working clothes, a group of native N.C.O.'s 
about him, conducting the shortened evening 
service as I had taught him to do at home. All 
round the room were the boys, and I picked up 
faces among the shadows. Most of them had 
the rough, low stools that the native man con- 
structs for himself in these days, and the ma- 
jority their own books, and they stood or sat or 
knelt with that curious air of simple independ- 
ence that is indefinable, but very really pres- 
ent among them. The yellow light gleamed on 
the blue uniforms, the bare walls, the serious 
faces, and lost itself in the shadows. So, night 
by night, they gathered, unashamed and un- 
compelled, and as one looked one wondered. 
How many British companies could have pro- 
duced a similar daily scene? It is inevitable 
that the question should be asked, and not only 
it. How many British companies have pri- 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 211 

vates who do what my catechist did unasked 
and unrewarded ? 

Later on I questioned the padre in charge, 
and learned how unostentatiously but how 
firmly he had dropped into position, and how 
regularly he had held to it. It interested me 
enormously. The man was doing Chaplain's 
work, but he was a labourer, not even a lance- 
corporal. It agreed with his record. I had 
found him, when I took over the Mission, in 
charge of an out-station which was unquestion- 
ably a failure. I judged that it was not his 
fault, but the fault of circumstances, over which 
neither he nor I have control, and that, more- 
over, the out-station had been badly placed from 
the start. So I acted, and closed the place, 
throwing him out of emplojTiient in mission 
work. Nor had I anything else to offer, until 
I bethought me that I might strengthen very 
considerably another station with his extra la- 
bour. He had, however, been getting £2 a 
month, and I could not afford to give that, with 
the Government grant going elsewhere as a re- 
sult of closing the first place. But I reckoned 
my luxury might pan out as worth £12 a year, 
and that, if not, I could make that good without 
so much difficulty, and I offered him the new 
position of a subordinate on a central station 
at half the w^age he had been earning when he 
was also his own master. As alternatives he 
might have either gone back to mine labour and 



212 STANDING BY 

earned at the least four times as mucli, or he 
might have gone on living on his lands as an or- 
dinary person, but with no Christian work other 
than the little he could do in his spare time. He 
chose my £1 a month, and I made a mental note 
of him. 

Then came the War, and he and a few others 
asked if they might go. It was a difficult de- 
cision, but I decided to thin out even the few 
catechists I had in answer to that great call, 
and I let him go. As I say, he joined as a pri- 
vate, and a private he has remained. Day by 
day, wet or fine, he has done his eight hours' 
or more manual work, and night by night gone 
round with his little bell, calling to the prayers. 
He has taught, too, and gathered men for the 
Sacraments, and done the padre's job as a whole 
better than most padres. And yet priesthood, 
under our system, is beyond him absolutely. 
He could never possibly learn the Kings of 
Israel and Judah, and even St. Paul's Epistles 
cannot mean much to him. Maybe we are 
right. Maybe the charismatic ministry should 
not be always recognised by the gift of regular 
orders ; but is this true of the Lesuto and like 
places, where we need both so ? I cannot agree. 
In any case I believe that man has done as much 
for the Church on his foreign service as any na- 
tive padre with his higher status and much 
greater pay. And I believe in my heart of 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 213 

hearts that he has done more than I with my 
captain's rank and all that goes with it. 

I opened the door and walked in while they 
were singing ''Abide w^ith me," their all but in- 
variable evening hymn. The catechist looked 
up and recognised me, and his face lit np eag- 
early. Ajid afterwards the rumour ran around, 
and he himself walked back with me and cried 
down the avenues : *' Yes, it is our father ! The 
father has come at last I ' * 

It was the same on board ship. One typical 
evening we were lazing along in the convoy on 
nobody knew what course, far from land, and 
not far from the Equator. The sun was going 
down as he only can go down in those latitudes, 
a great fierce glowing ball that dipped visibly 
into the clear-cut horizon. I had strolled along 
the boat-deck to the stern reserved for the boys, 
and joined a little group of officers who leaned 
on the rail and looked down on to the well-deck. 
The wide mouth of the hold, planked over and 
ringed in, was the site of the daily evening 
church. In the centre, a small space cleared 
around him, stood the native padre, in his uni- 
form, bare-headed, and all around clustered the 
boys as thick as bees. In the dying light and 
in the rich afterglow the service went on — a 
hymn, a reading of Scripture, a few minutes* 
explanation, some prayers, a hymn, an extem- 
pore prayer, the Grace, and the King. The f aoQ 



214i STANDING BY 

of the padre as he prayed impressed me very- 
much. He was so quiet, seemingly a little in- 
different as to who hoard, so grave, so simple. 
One looked curiously at the boys. The Chris- 
tians stood reverently motionless ; the heathen, 
for the most part, gravely watched, a little 
awed; some (and one knew them for town-boys 
or half-castes, on the whole) lay around the ring 
and smoked indifferently. The padre finished 
and put on his cap. "The King," he said in 
English. All then stirred or settled do\\Ti to 
attention, and we on the boat-deck lifted hands 
to the salute. The native day was done. 

A Lieutenant and I strolled f orrard together. 

"Two services every day they have, don't 
they, Padre?" he asked. 

"Yes," saidl. 

"Extraordinary thing!" he said; "they seem 
to like services. ' ' 

"Yes," saidl. 

Pie shrugged his shoulders. "Rum thing," 
he said ; * ' the Lord knows why ! ' ' 

"I expect He does," said L 

He stared at me. 

3. The Eomance of Missions 

Before ever I went to Africa, I used to do a 
good deal of public speaking on behalf of Mis- 
sions, and looking back at it now it seems to me 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 215 

that the things one commonly said on the plat- 
form then it would be impossible to say to-day. 
In those days one 's mental attitude was always 
that of one who appealed to a wealthy and ener- 
getic home Church on behalf of the infant 
Churches overseas and the unfortunate heathen. 
One knew, of course, that there were elements 
of weakness at home and elements of strength 
abroad, and undoubtedly there is more money 
at home than abroad ; but for all that, I feel now 
that the days in which such appeal was possible 
are past for me. Writing here to-day in 
France, with Africa on the one hand and Eng- 
land on the other, it is Africa — ^native Africa 
— that makes one's blood run hotly and one's 
courage leap high. There is the Christianity 
of the Apostolic Church; there is life and love; 
there faith is the great adventure, the romance, 
the triumph, the laughter that it was when the 
world was young. A call to work in England 
would be to me a dreadful heart-searching. I 
should fear that in trying to save England I 
should become a castaway. But in trying to 
save Africa, Africa saves you. 

I was coming gradually to think this before 
the War, but the War has settled it for me. Up 
there, in the mountains of Leribe, one tends to 
forget what English Christianity is like. One 
positively forgets that people are actually 
squabbling still about vestments and fasting 
and discipline, and arguing over things like con- 



gl6 STANDING BY 

gregational singing and the reform of the 
Prayer Book. There is, for example, no Sesuto 
Prayer Book ^ as yet ; it is being made. There 
is, for that matter, no English Prayer Book in 
England to-day in the sense of a Prayer Book 
suitable to the needs of the modern English 
people. But the difference between Africa and 
England is that in Africa we are cutting our 
clothes to fit us, whereas in England you are al- 
ways trying to persuade yourselves that the 
ready-made clothes provided are really an ad- 
mirable fit. 

But enough of these secondary things ; I want 
to say something about the more important mat- 
ters of discipline and life. In Africa one gets 
to take them for granted, but when Africa 
came to France, the contrast rose up and con- 
fronted one. 

I propose to tell a couple of stories in this 
little chapter to illustrate part at least of this. 

At one of the regular Church of England 
Chaplains' meetings at a certain base in France 
our A.C.G. made a few observations concern- 
ing the observance of Fasting Communion. He 
said it was an excellent discipline if accepted 
with caution and moderation. In France, how- 
ever, there was no question but that it had to 
be much modified. He was not speaking of the 
firing-line, where it was admitted, even by Ro- 

* There is, of course, a Sesuto translation of the English 
Book of Common Prayer. 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 217 

man Catholics, that soldiers going into action 
ought to be offered the Holy Sacrament without 
restriction, but on the lines of communication 
the pressure was no less stringent. For exam- 
ple, labour men, going out to work for a twelve- 
hour shift at 6 a.m., and doing that day in and 
day out, should certainly be given Evening 
Communion. He hoped there would be no 
trouble. . . . 

Now, I am not commenting on this. Nothing 
is farther from my wish than that theological 
questions should obtrude here. But I stole a 
guilty and ashamed look at my two native 
padres on my right. For the day before a num- 
ber of our black communicants, going out day 
after day at 5.30 a.m. for often twelve or more 
hour periods, had asked for and received the 
Holy Communion at 4.30 a.m. It was not 
Popery that made them do it. It was simplic- 
ity, for it never struck them that an hour's sleep 
might be more valuable than their Communion. 
And it was grit. 

Then there was my visit to another base 
which is yet fresh in my mind. A new company 
of Basuto had come over, and in it were some 
thirty communicants of my own district, boys 
who had made up their minds in a body, after 
much deliberation (as is the native way), to fol- 
low me overseas. We were delighted to see 
each other. To them it was a kind of wonder 
that I should be there. The days of mysteri- 



S18 STANDING BY 

ous travelling over trackless seas seemed to 
them, I suppose, a kind of inconsequent busi- 
ness, and it was really wonderful, not merely to 
arrive, but to find positively that a friend had 
been before and was waiting for them. Only 
children and natives really appreciate the won- 
der of life. Thus they came running to meet 
me; one covered his mouth and said, *'Ah!" a 
great number of times in delighted amazement ; 
another, my stable-boy at home, responded to 
my questions with delightful naivete. *'How is 
the Mofumahalij your mistress?" I asked. 
"Very well, my father, but Johnny is looking 
even better." Now, Johnny is my favourite 
pony, specially in this boy's charge before the 
King had need of him. 

Now, these boys went out to work at 5.30 p.m. 
that Saturday night. It was late November, and 
as it chanced a particularly stormy week-end. 
All the night it rained, and the wind was pierc- 
ingly chill, and as I watched them march off 
through the horrible mud, I thought how miser- 
able the open wharf-side would be all that long 
night. At midnight they knocked off for rest 
and food, but this latter the thirty odd com- 
municant lads refused. At 6.15 a.m. on the 
Sunday morning the company tramped in at 
the Camp gates. They were dismissed and 
fell out. These Christians then, without a 
word, streamed off to the hut in which an altar 



KINDERGARTEN RELIGION 219 

was prepared. I was waiting there, and one 
by one, as many as had need, they came np for 
the absokition of the Precious Blood. Then we 
began the Holy Communion. A Hlotse server 
served me as at home, and as at home we sang 
Sanctus and Benedictus, and the Agnus and 
Salutaris Hostia. As I passed down the kneel- 
ing line with the Holy Sacrament, I looked at 
them. They had been working at carting sacks 
of flour, and the stuff had stained and caked 
their faces. They were wet and tired and cold. 
And I was so proud that I found it hard to 
speak. . . . Not that I would have spared them 
one single hardship ; not for anything would I 
have given them that day breakfast and four 
hours' sleep first. It is this that breeds war- 
riors for the Church's hour of need. 

Missions are romantic beyond words, and 
there are many aspects of their romance. Four 
of the boys that morning had done public pen- 
ance for breaking the Seventh Commandment 
before they left Basutoland. But I have seen 
so many white communicants break the Seventh 
Commandment without doing public penance 
that I no longer hesitate to write such a fact as 
that. Indeed, I glory in it. This is the ro- 
mance of missions that the angels sing about 
the Throne of God and of the Lamb. 

A tolerant, clever Presbyterian minister 
whom I met at Cape Town said to a friend of 



220 STANDING BY 

mine of Catholicism, * ' One must remember that 
it is the Kindergarten Religion." True. And 
the Lord Christ said, "Except ye be converted 
and become as little children, ye cannot enter 
the kingdom of heaven." 



XXII 
^'AU GUIDON'^ 

ONE must, admit that the secret was not, 
on the whole, well kept, but if it had 
been I should have feared to risk even 
the camouflage of this chapter. For the Guidon 
is a pearl among restaurants and it should not 
be cast before Well, perhaps that is an un- 
happy sentence, though the first part is so happy 
that I shall merely take the liberty of conclud- 
ing the latter with, say, '■ ' the world. ' ' The Gui- 
don was not merely the Mecca of gourmands ; it 
was not merely the Paradise of such impecuni- 
ous subs as knew it before their pay was raised. 
It was Olympic. It approached Utopia. Here the 
philosopher could meditate upon those simplici- 
ties that Mr. G. K. Chesterton holds up to us, 
and here the student of men and of affairs could 
yet savour the days that are past. It was in 
that sense a survival, yet never was it behind 
the times. Yesterday's limande never figured 
on the menu. If the morning catch had been 
herring and not sole, then, in proud simplicity, 
the Guidon offered herring, and the habitue, 
hearing some chance visitor air his knowledge 

221 



222 STANDING BY 

of tlie French tongue and of modern eating- 
houses by exclaiming at the apparent scantiness 
of the bill-of-fare, would glance up and catch 
Marie's eye, and lean back well content. Oh 
yes! Marie would get moyisieur le capitaine le 
limande, but the tone of her voice as she called 
over the stair was enough. One knew that here 
was a stranger from the outer darkness who 
knew not the Guidon, and whom the Guidon 
would not know. 

Some false friend, however, must have parted 
W'ith information for him to be there at all, for 
surely no mortal officer ever found his way to 
the place unaided. One passed to seek it down 
the populous streets, past the great glaring ho- 
tels and restaurants — those strange modern 
caravanserais where everything is provided, 
where one eats all dishes at all seasons, plays 
billiards, drinks cocktails, sets the gramophone 
going, ogles the girls, and sees the world and 
(in France) his wife. Far be it from me to 
say that these have no interest or delight; I 
would scorn such hypocrisy. Life in all its 
manifestations is interesting, and your modem 
popular palace, whether in London or in North- 
ern France, has interest as one such manifesta- 
tion. But a little goes a long way, except in 
francs. One may turn his back on such for the 
veld and the mountain without regret. If this 
be civilisation, it is enough to see and pass on. 
Few can have delicious lingering memories of 



"AU GUIDON" 223 

such. With pipe glowing, the moon and the 
stars above, I shall not dream about the camp 
fire of Tortoni's. 

Pass down the street then, until you are on 
the quay, but which of the many I shall not say. 
You are now in the waterside region of many 
odours and strange passers-by, who smell of the 
sea. The little cafe debits may invite such, but 
not, easily, you or me. We are out to do more 
than pass a slip of humanity under the micro- 
scope; we are out, as the French say, to eat — 
a great business. If we may do both at once, 
good; and such, indeed, is the prospect at the 
Guidon. We avoid, on the narrow slippery 
footway, the French equivalent of Mr. W. W. 
Jacobs' Night- Watchman ; we step aside for a 
party of marines. I seize you by the arm, for 
you would otherwise overshoot the mark, and 
we enter a narrow, dark, unadorned (for I will 
not write dirty) passage which allows the entry 
of one man only at a time. At the far end, and 
reached by faith and not by sight, is a door with 
perchance a flicker of light beneath it. I turn 
the familiar handle for which you would have 
to grope, and we are in a kitchen. 

A big fat man is the presiding deity. He 
looks us over grudgingly at first, and conveys 
the impression that newcomers are not wholly 
welcome. One realises one is in the old world, 
for unlike moderns, he makes no attempt to con- 
ceal his trade ; indeed, he might well be — as he 



2U STANDING BY 

is — ^proud of the art which you have come to 
admire. But this kitchen, this restaurant in- 
deed, for he is at once cook and proprietor, is 
his home, his stronghold, wherein, if he dis- 
pense food, he has nevertheless a dignity. De- 
spite shirt sleeves and apron, he is particular : 
oh yes! monsieur is particular. It is good in 
these days to find the vender of anything par- 
ticular about his customer. His is the spirit 
of an artist, not of a business man ; but the days 
when domestic service and every humble labour 
was an art, were the days of trade guilds and 
are gone with them. The proprietor of the 
Guidon, should he give, as his forbears, a 
stained-glass window to the Cathedral, would 
not scorn, as they with their fish-emblem in the 
comer, to mark his gift with the sign of his 
trade. It is a proper pride. If I hail him 
''Monsieur" and salute, it is not because of the 
Eevolution, but since this man has plainly a vo- 
cation wherein he may well abide as nobly with 
God as I in mine. 

However, there are winding and steep stairs 
before us, up which we pass, noticing, however, 
that the kitchen is small and dark and must 
often be very hot ; that there are no modem con- 
veniences ; that there is a mediaeval sanitation ; 
that every dish has to be carried by hand up 
these stairs ; and yet that the two or three girls 
below are smiling. A miracle in these days, 
my masters! I do not account for it, I state 



"AU GUIDON" 225 

it. I state also that at the top is Marie, who 
is another miracle. Marie. Henceforth there 
is only one Marie for me, and I name her rev- 
erently. 

Marie presides alone, whenever the restau- 
rant is open, over a small room that seats some 
two dozen people. She has two satellites, it is 
true, who assist on the tiny landing to remove 
and hang up coats, but these do not enter the 
holy place. The post of one is practically on 
the stairs, she is indeed the link between Marie 
and the under-world. If Marie, on the land- 
ing, cries Une omelette aux champignons, it is 
the satellite who leans half down the stairs and 
cries into the kitchen. Her sister in labour 
properly occupies the small scullery which is it- 
self no more than a continuation of the land- 
ing, and attends to the washing of plates. Yet 
surely one pair of hands cannot wash all the 
plates or wash them there, just as that tiny cup- 
board cannot surely be the cellar whence come 
all the wines — wines such as might have con- 
tented the Three Musketeers. But then no 
more would we have supposed that the small 
sideboard just inside the room could hold all 
the dessert, all the clean linen, all the knives 
and forks, essential to the thrice filling of that 
room (even if it be small) as is done day after 
day. But then as with the conveniences, the 
scullery, the kitchen, the cellar, the sideboard, 
so with Marie, one asks, bewildered, how she 



g26 STANDING BY 

can be sufficient for these tilings? It is the 
mystery, I cannot explain it, but she and they 
are. 

A small room, then, we enter; true, but a 
room. It is a room with a personality, a past; 
a room that one feels instinctively knows that 
it is a room. Your modern restaurant din- 
ing-room is such a soulless thing. It has been 
made to order in a day, its garnishing deter- 
mined by the bank-account of the firm. It is, 
as a rule, all gilt and glitter, and all but a sin- 
ister thing, like the web of a spider, only not 
half as beautiful. One knows it through and 
through in a minute, and though it may per- 
haps dazzle, it is impossible to feel at home 
with it. I know restaurants which make me 
hate the proprietor with a horrible and deadly 
hatred, or, on the other hand, cafes which make 
me momentarily tolerant of modernity by a cer- 
tain grace of decoration; but at the Guidon 
the room itself becomes one's friend. It has 
lived, this room. I would not change it in the 
least. I do not altogether agree with its taste 
in adding to its walls certain highly-coloured 
vulgarities of the Swiss lakes ; I should prefer 
that it had remained content with the homely 
oil-paintings it gathered half a century ago of 
ships in full sail; but then even one's best 
friends fail sometimes in their taste. I do not 
love them the less. I smile : maybe I love them 
more. So it is here : in my dreams I shall often 



"AU GUIDON" 227 

revisit tins room, and smile round at the walls, 
and seek my favourite corner by the window, 
and glance at the grandfather clock at once to 
see how long I can linger. 

Sitting opposite me, you may notice that the 
walls are panelled, and that in the comer is 
unmistakably one of those folding beds of the 
times of our forefathers, that shut back into 
the wall by day and was pulled out by night. 
You may notice that no line of the old room 
is straight; that the linen is spotlessly clean 
and is changed for every dinner; that the tables 
hold six or eight with the camaraderie of last 
century; that a charming little cord operates 
mysteriously these old-fashioned windows that 
look out across window-boxes of carnations to 
the docks. It is good to sit here in summer 
with the window open. The scent of the flow- 
ers blows in; on the gleaming water move 
trawlers, motor-boat patrols, an occasional sea- 
plane, transatlantic liners, and innumerable 
small skiffs. Eight opposite, moored against 
the hospital, is the camouflaged liner that the 
incredible malice of our enemies makes do duty 
for a Red Cross blazoned hospital ship. You 
can see from here something of the pageantry 
of war, something of that brotherhood which 
the threatening of our liberties has called into 
being, something of human wreckage from the 
flood of human hate. The viligant destroyer, 
the transport of cheering troops from the 



228 STANDING BY 

States, the ship that takes passengers who have 
to be home to her in stretchers, all are visible 
from that little window. 

Not that Marie cares for you to dream. She 
is a great type of French girl, is Marie. A 
miracle of smart, deft waiting, she is also a 
marvel of accuracy and a survival of the days 
before automatic tills and cash registers, when 
men found it possible to remember without 
Pelmanism. One says all this, and yet Marie 
remains on her pinnacle. She is not explained. 
There may be a score of diners, but never a 
note makes Marie of the orders of each, and at 
the end, with her stumpy pencil on the back of 
the restaurant card, she casts up omnisciently 
the line of undecipherable hieroglyphics she 
has just scribbled down. 

Whether the waiting or the cooking is the 
greater triumph of the Guidon I can never de- 
termine. Not even Madame Poulard turned 
out better omelettes; no Paris restaurant can 
beat the steak; but all that is understandable. 
How the omelette comes to smoke upon your 
plate so close upon the order that you have 
hardly felt yourself to wait at all, is utterly be- 
yond me. Yes, it must be the service that is 
the more mai'vellous. And even in war-time, 
my good sirs, one can dine like a prince for six 
francs ! 

Marie is shrewd, witty, plain, but of an ex- 
cellent figure, always well dressed, always self- 



"AU GUIDON" 229 

possessed. She can command a roomful of 
merry men as one to tlie manner born, and that 
although one knows that she is no icicle. One 
does not have to wait twelve months for the 
mistletoe ; I know, for I have seen. But money 
will not command such favours, for Marie, 
though a waitress, is aware that she has a king- 
dom and is a queen. That is one of her secrets, 
the one I have learned, but for the rest, who 
can say? She surely could have married well, 
could Marie, and the happy estate is not alto- 
gether absent from her thoughts ; but she is not 
so much as engaged yet. She pursues her even 
way. I have seen her at the midnight Mass, 
devout, reserved, for Marie has religion; and 
I have seen her at the Sunday Opera, gay, en- 
trancing, for Marie loves life like all good 
French girls. I have passed in the early after- 
noon when dejeuner is over and dinner not be- 
gun, and seen her through the window at her 
sewing; I have even seen her mistress of her 
home; but these things serve, as it were, one 
central purpose. Marie is a waitress, and she 
is proud of it. It is her vocation. She must 
know that the Guidon would not be the Guidon 
without her. And if I could paint, she should 
be shown dexterously renewing the snowy nap- 
kins of that little table near the window, with 
a background of flowering carnations in the 
green boxes. 
I know the story of how the Guidon came to 



230 STANDING BY 

be, but I shall not tell it here. It would be to 
waste your time and mine. I know that a ro- 
mance has been woven about it, of the days 
when the docks were smaller and the edge of 
the town and the green fields near at hand, but 
another pen has set that out. It is enough for 
me that the little restaurant is a sign of the 
days that are slipping away, but a type also of 
what we may passionately hope to see when all 
this madness of national jealousy and imperial 
pretension and Hohenzollem play-acting is 
crushed once and for all. If there is a nobility 
in good service, a dignity in labour, a beauty 
in simple, homely things well done, left any- 
where in the world, it is here. Mine host of the 
Guidon belongs to the days of faith, when a 
man was content with his trade and found his 
joy in honest good-fellowship. His ambition 
lay, not in piling dollars and quitting when he 
had a fortune, but in the establishment of his 
name in the earth, and in the enjoyment of rep- 
utation and respect. He presumed, simple fel- 
low ! that it was right for the king to rule, and 
the priest to pray, and the minstrel to sing, and 
the brewer to brew, and the innkeeper to en- 
tertain, and the wayfarer to enjoy and be 
grateful, without jealousy. If he knew that he 
could cook, he ran a restaurant and cooked ; he 
did not found a limited liability company and 
stand for Parliament. And there were homes 
and inns in merry England in those days, just 



"AU GUIDON" asi 

as in the rest of merry Christendom, and re- 
ligion in the land, for although there was al- 
ways rough with the smooth, man knew the se- 
cret of each, and abode in his vocation with 
God. 

We troop in and out of the Guidon, subal- 
terns and colonels, the men from America, Aus- 
tralia, South Africa, England; we jostle 
French, Belgians, Italians; our company is 
largely, too, of the mercantile marine and of 
the King's Navy; and we belonged to all the 
trades four years ago. In a word, the world 
is passing through the Guidon as it goes up to 
war. One wonders if it knows that the utmost 
it can hope to win on the battlefield is in some 
sort mirrored here. A bottle of your good red 
Beaune, Marie ! Sirs, to Liberty I 



xxin 

JUMIEGES 

THE two towers, grey and clean, rise 
from rich water meadows and orchard 
lands, far from main roads and the 
railway. The trees are immemorial here; the 
very barns so ancient structures of beam and 
mud and moss that it seems they must be in 
some sort alive not to fall ; and the stone farm- 
houses have been dotted where still they stand 
since the days when the bells rang in the roof- 
less towers. It may be the spirit of Jumieges 
is to be sought at large in the wide peaceful 
lands she owned of old. 

The two towers rise, rounded, mutilated, no 
longer twin, from the solid Norman western 
front, and the daws wheel in and out of them. 
Within, the massive nave stands yet, dangerous 
in decay, but solemn, still, and grand, and one 
looks right up the trampled floor, through the 
great wide-flung arch of the choir, under that 
miraculously sustained single side of the cen- 
tral tower, across the grass that was the sanc- 
tuary, to the nine chapels beyond. There is 
one of the nine left to show what the eight were 

232 



JUMIEGES 233 

like, one so majestic in its isolation, so massive, 
yet so delicate, so serene, that it would seem 
that the spirit of Jumieges might still live 
there. 

Yet nowhere else is turf so rich a green, nor 
could finer primroses, violets, cowslips, anemo- 
nes, star more gladsomely its beauty. In no 
other ruin do such tall trees grow straight by 
such ruined walls as if they would support 
them. Surely there is no rival anywhere to the 
beauty here of the clinging ivy on the falling 
buttresses, or to the vista of yellow-green beach 
and dark ancient yew and emerald grass and 
starry flowers as one sees them through the 
seventh-century church of St. Peter against the 
grey stones beyond. And maybe the spirit of 
Jumieges lives there. 

Or, of the many who visit the ancient Chap- 
ter House, set in shade, so cool, so still; of the 
many who look where the yawning graves, and 
the two or three stone coffins burst open, tell 
again their story of sacrilege ; of the many who 
are told that on yonder raised step stood the 
reigning abbot's chair, and that he daily gov- 
erned living men across the graves of his own 
dead; of these some, maybe, go awed away. 
Some, maybe, though fallen is the curtain of 
the years and strange our day, may find heart 
somehow tuned to hearts once here. For them, 
the spirit of Jumieges lives here. 



834 STANDING BY 

Many have written of Rheims, Ypres, Lou- 
vain, and now of Amiens in this War, but no 
one, so far as I know, has written of Jumieges. 
Yet it is surely impossible not to feel that there 
is a connection between them all, and it is cer- 
tain that men will speak of them in one breath 
a century hence. Very likely someone will 
write on the ruined churches of France — Mont 
St. Michel and Jumieges, Rheims and Amiens. 
Within the same covers will men recall their 
glories ; but, as of storms upon the tide of life, 
will it be written that Jumieges fell in the 
French Revolution and Rheims in the German 
invasion. 

It is a strange fatality that human affairs 
should be so fraught with destruction, that re- 
formers must be iconoclasts. One would have 
thought that we might have accomplished our 
revolutions without wanton destruction, or at 
least that the centuries would have taught us 
reverence and restraint. But no, Presbyteri- 
anism must needs ruin Dunkeld, Anglicanism 
Glastonbury, Puritanism Ely and many more, 
the Religion of the Goddess of Liberty Jumie- 
ges, Calvinism the western front of Rouen, 
Prussian Judaism Rheims. Each must at- 
tempt to march to its conquests over the noble 
and the fair. Yet each phase of thought has 
so short a day, and none seems able to learn 
from the past that at least it might not sully 
such name as it has. 



JUMIEGES 235 

I trust that I shall not be thought unpatri- 
otic if I compare, for example, Jumieges and 
Eheims. There seems to me to be so just a 
comparison. Germany has persuaded herself 
that she has a culture which the world needs 
and which should be imposed by arms. No 
monument of the past, however precious, 
should be allowed to hinder the consummation 
of this dream. The foe must not only be 
beaten ; he must be cowed, trampled upon, rav- 
ished, stripped, till he beg his life from the con- 
queror, and perforce accept his ideals. So 
France, at the Revolution, thought and acted. 
The Church was largely the foe mthin its bor- 
ders, though the Eepublic declared war also on 
the world. No monument, however precious, 
was allowed to hinder the consummation of the 
dream of liberty. The foe must not only be 
beaten ; he must be cowed, trampled upon, rav- 
ished, stripped, till he beg his life from the con- 
queror and perforce accept his ideals. The 
brethren of Jumieges were driven out, God 
knows whither ; maybe they shed their blood as 
other religious in France of the period. This 
great monument of piety and zeal was first 
stripped, and then sold for a stone quarry to 
complete its utter ruin. And so well was the 
work done that not even millions of francs, such 
as the Republic, grown wise, has poured out on 
Mont St. Michel in order to restore what it de- 
stroyed, can avail in this case. Even so, if 



236 STANDING BY 

Germany annexed Eastern France, she could 
not rebuild the glory of Rheims that her guns 
have laid waste. Roofless walls and naked tow- 
ers must stand on both sites for generations to 
testify to human folly. 

This old abbey, embowered in a bend of the 
Seine, has become for me a place of pilgrimage. 
Years ago now I saw it first, coming from the 
north in the set of sun, and resting for a while 
at the ferry to see the light die on the mellow 
grey towers among the thin poplars and wide- 
spreading apple orchards. Several times this 
year, coming from the south, have I run 
through the forest above Rouen, and down the 
hill to St. George's and across the flats and 
through the tiny fields, until one sees first the 
wall of the estate and then that noble stricken 
front. The other day, the first primroses and 
violets were about. The clean spring sunlight 
rested on the lush grass and new green, and 
dealt tenderly with the tumbling stones. One 
little chapel came down last winter, and man 
will never see again that carven roof that was. 
But still one can pass in a few minutes from 
century to century, from the sixteenth to the 
sixth; still stand in the great refectory and 
faintly see again the cloister-garth, though 
only some half-dozen stones remain to show its 
place. Here, where two thousand five hundred 
brethren once laboured and prayed together, 
we soldiers of justice, toleration, and liberty, 



JUMIEGES 237 

under the flags of those two great persecuting 
iconoclasts, Republicanism and Protestantism, 
make a half-day's holiday. We visit what is 
shown of the twenty miles of secret tunnelling 
that once connected Candebec, Jumieges, and 
St, George's de Boscherville. We wonder why 
they digged so, and jest, forgetful of that voice 
out of the past, so amazingly tender and yet so 
pitiful: "We loved passages. They were 
safe, and the priesthood loveth secret places. 
There is something in us that loveth mystical 
things, so we tell not all, but leave it to the love 
which seeketh and is not wearied." 

I quote, of course, from that wonderful book 
The Gate of Remembrance, and speak of Glas- 
tonbury. But the spirit of those builders was 
everywhere the same, and it was with a mind 
full of ''Johannes, the Child of Nature," that 
I visited Jumieges last. I make no comment 
as I speak of him. Not for me are these specu- 
lations of the Universal Memory and the rest. 
It is a jargon some may understand, but the 
voice that speaks out of those distant years of 
that past age has a beauty of its own that si- 
lences disputation. They say of Johannes: 
''Simple he was, but as a dog loveth his mas- 
ter, so loved he his Howse with a greater love 
than any of them that planned and builded it. 
They were of the earth — planners and builders 
for their great glory, nor even, though honest 
men, for the glory of God. But Johannes, 



238 STANDING BY 

mystified and bewildered by its beauty, gave it 
his heart, as one gives his heart to a beloved 
mistress. . . . Even as of old he wandered by 
the mere and saw the sunset shining on her 
far-off towers, so now in dreams the earth-love 
part of him strives to picture the vanished glo- 
ries, and led by the masonry of love, he knows 
that ye also love what he has loved, and so he 
strives to give you glimpses of his dreams." 

Ah, Johannes, I have never read dreams 
more beautiful! I am not ashamed to fill my 
chapter with them, for if I too have dreamed 
so, I have not the wit to set them forth as you. 
"At night," you say, ''the sound of many 
waters refreshed ye parched soil. From tower 
and from the high roofes the sound came like 
the sound of water floods, and the gargoyles 
shouted each to each, and the cloisters whis- 
pered comfort and refreshment as we lay un- 
der the dormer roofe in parched and sultry 
nights. I who speak mind me of the glory of 
sound even now, and I ever loved the waters 
and the mere, and the voices that whispered 
around me . . . therefore loved I the rain on 
our hundred roofs, and the myriad voices that 
came from the water spouts. I didde sleepe 
on the south side, hard by the great gabell, and 
soe heard I the sound whilst others slept. Vai 
mihi, that it is departed! and the voices are 
heard no more. . . . 

''We have sat in the grate gallery under the 



JUMIEGES 239 

west window and watched the pilgrims when 
the snn went downe. It was in truth a brave 
sight, and one to move the soul of one there. 
The orgayne that did stande in the gallery did 
answer hym that spake on the great screene, 
and men were amazed not knowing which did 
answer which. Then did ye bellows blowe and 
ye . . . man who beat with his hands upon the 
manual did strike yet harder, and all did shout 
Te Deums, so that all ye town heard the noise 
of the shouting, and ye little orgaynes in ye 
chapels did join in the triumph. Then ye belles 
did ring and we thought hyt must have gone 
to ye gates of Heaven. . . . 

''Ye have founden our Church, and ye holy 
places where my unworthy feet have trod, and 
the Hall where some did talk of Glaston and 
some did eat that they might be strong for 
God's ordinances. And ye have found ye lytell 
chappie where our most holy ones did lie. Now, 
what think ye?" 

''What think ye?" It is a cruel question to 
ask of us, Johannes, in war-time. Do you 
know our age 1 Do you know that we live in a 
period which has reduced skill to mechanical 
accuracy and high adventure to a matter of 
the preponderance of machines? Do you know 
that our world is bathed in blood because the 
half of it has made Superman its god, and util- 
ity, commercial gain, and pride of place his 
vestals? You may have loved beauty on earth 



240 STANDING BY 

too well, but you loved it because it seemed to 
you a reflection of heaven; we live in an age 
indifferent to heaven and eager to make of 
earth a model lodging-house. Gargoyles ! We 
waste no time on gargoyles ! Do you think we 
care for the music of their shouting, and for 
voices that whisper? Pilgrims? The only pil- 
grims we know wait in theatre queues or fill 
excursion trains. What do we think of you? 
We think you wasted your life. You did not 
breed children for the State. You spent your 
time learning to sing Te Deum. We know God 
better. 

''Pish! 
He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well." 

At Jumieges I have been glad before now that 
it is a ruin. It is nobler so than as a museum, 
or a ''monument of the State," or a church de- 
voted to sacred concerts or exhortations to the 
Almighty to do His duty, couched in (what did 
they say of those state prayers recently?) 
"nervous but manly English." In some 
moods, one hardly grieves that the Kaiser's 
guns are murdering Rheims, for, if he conquer 
it, the guns may well at least have saved the 
noble church from worse things. Edith Cavell 
had a finer fate than many Belgian women. It 
is better to die than live dishonoured. But 
must it be so? Is it not possible that this hell- 
ish agony of war may teach us better things? 
The light of the flames it has lit shows up piti- 



JUMIEGES 241 

lessly the weakness of our modern ideals, and 
maybe one other light would be vivid enough. 
Jumieges stands for the sovereignty of 
beauty and truth, for the true kingdom of the 
soul. It is a monument of the belief that (xod 
and His affairs come first, and that the king- 
doms of this world can hold no more than pass- 
ing good. We are so incredibly utilitarian. 
The things that seem to us important are the 
commensurable things of the body and the 
State and the present, and the rest come sec- 
ond or not at all. In the Army the medical 
staff has every attention, the spiritual picks 
up the crumbs. A hospital is necessary, a 
church irrelevant. A recreation-room is all- 
sufficient. In civil life we build primarily for 
the edification of men — that they shall see and 
hear well ; we legislate that they shall eat, sleep, 
breed, and work well. The younger son goes 
into the Church. In the East, the fakir is the 
object of veneration and respect, in the West 
the millionaire. In the Middle Ages the min- 
strel, the artist, the dreamer, despite all the 
rough and tumble of the times, found a wel- 
come and a place ; among us none, save he can 
perform a new music-hall turn or figure as a 
cinema artist. This changed point of view 
runs all through life. I pick up Mr. Saffroni- 
Middleton's charming book on the South Seas, 
but he, and the world at large, have no idea 
that it should be an arguable position that a 



242 STANDING BY 

Christian horribly clothed, dirty and starving, 
is better off than a heathen beautifully naked, 
clean and well-fed, and that of the starvation of 
the Christian and the heathenism of the Sa- 
moan, the latter is incomparably the greater and 
more pressing sorrow. 

But this is to wander off a little, and I would 
not do that. To come back to Jumieges; here 
was a community in which the service of truth 
and beauty stood first; in which all that mar- 
vellous and unstinted charitable relief pro- 
ceeded from a love of God ; in which healthful 
toil and the enriching of the earth provided to 
simple kindly souls joy in labour, since they 
were for the glory of God. Men were strange- 
ly content here. I write strangely because we 
are so rarely content, and seek it last of all 
where these found it. Communion with God, 
honest physical toil, beauty and health, these 
Jumieges offered to rest the soul. These were 
the wages offered for the service of a lifetime. 
There was neither minimum wage nor maxi- 
mum standard mentioned, though the monas- 
tery was almost perfectly democratic. 

It is perfectly true that the monastic life 
was a special vocation, but it is interesting that 
the ideals of the monasteiy were largely the 
ideals of labour outside it. Those ideals ex- 
isted in the world of labour so long as the 
monastic system in its midst radiated them — ■ 
that also is interesting. For the guild was ex- 



JUMIEGES ^43 

traordinarily like the eomniuiiity of religious. 
It also was based on religion, and sought both 
the sanction and rev/ard of religion; it also 
maintained the honesty of physical toil, for 
the master had first to serve his apprenticeship, 
not as a junior partner but as a labourer; and it 
also set high the beauty of its craftsmanship 
as a thing in itself a reward. With the passing 
of the guilds, passed these ideals generally from 
the economic world. 

Let us be sure of our ground. The guilds 
were not the product of a certain type of indus- 
try, nor did they cease because the age of 
machinery was inimical to them. It was not the 
passing of the individual touch in manufacture, 
nor the coming of enormous markets and in- 
tense competition, that killed the guilds. These 
things, indeed, have created the trades unions, 
which tend more and more to be a sort of guild. 
They fulfil much the same function. They pro- 
tect the craftsman, and set high standards, not 
merely of wages ; they have a social side ; their 
tendency is increasingly to make the master a 
master workman, and to give the workman a 
voice in the council chamber. But guilds and 
trades unions came into existence for totally 
different ends. They were inspired by totally 
different ideals. The first were to make pos- 
sible the worthy exercise of crafts conceived as 
noble ; the second to wage war on the capitalist 
classes. The guilds found themselves instino- 



244 STANDING BY 

tively allied with religion, the trades unions 
treat religion as a thing apart. 

Despite modern conditions, then, there is no 
intrinsic reason why we should not have guilds 
again, fulfilling the functions of trades unions 
in the spirit of Jumieges. I am convinced that 
this is the only solution of our troubles. The 
other day an eminent and learned Oxford 
economist visited this base to instruct the men 
in the proposed course of modern economic 
legislation. He dealt at large and very ably, 
with a wonderful touch of sympathy to which 
the men eagerly responded, with the Whitlow 
reports, and having finished, he invited ques- 
tions. The first was simple and direct. "Good,'^ 
said the private who questioned, *'is all that 
you have said, but, sir, in the last resort, if, 
despite district committees and joint boards, 
men and masters differ, what then?" And the 
answer was simple. "We recognise that this 
system cannot ultimately obviate this. It will 
decrease the probability because removing 
many of the causes of strife, but the possibility 
remains. In that event the Government will not 
coerce. It recognises the right of men to strike, 
the right of masters to lock out. We must ad- 
mit that ultimately we shall be no better off 
than we were, if the worst comes to the worst. ' ' 

It was the frankest possible confession of the 
weakness of our modern civilisation. "We can 
do our best, but we admit our fallibility," Why? 



JUMIEGES ftm 

* ' The Government recognises the right of men 
to strike, the right of masters to lock out." In 
a word, the Government — the State — recognises 
the supremacy of individual rights. It does so 
because its point of view is material, earth- 
bound. There is only one authority that does 
not recognise the supremacy of individual 
rights, but subordinates them to the rights 
of the brethren, and even of the weaker breth- 
ren, and that does so because its point of view 
is primarily towards God and cannot see that 
earth is the final bourne. A union of masters 
and men, based on the principle that, whatever 
happens, the man has no right to strike and the 
master no right to lock out, for if so the noble 
craft would be injured and the brethren be 
prevented from the service of God in their la- 
bour, that was the guild. A violation of its 
principles did not carry its members to the 
Prime Minister, but to the Lord Christ. 

Yet there is hope. There lies before me a 
paper setting out that ''those things which 
England has been ready to die for, we mean 
to make England live for." They are: Good 
Homes, Full Education, Sound Industrial Con- 
ditions, and Purity. Concerning them it is writ- 
ten: 

' ' The devotion and loyalty of the vast major- 
ity of our soldiers is centred on Christ Himself 
as the Leader. Men under Him can and will 
bring in the Kingdom of God here on earth. In 



246 STANDING BY 

His Name we ask you to think of these prac- 
tical questions, and to prepare yourselves to 
face them. With His Spirit understood and 
His Laws obeyed, surrounded by the unseen 
fellowship of those who — like Him — have died 
for others, we shall see the better England of 
our dreams and theirs." And there are three 
names on the paper: "D. Haig, F.M. ; J. M. 
Simms, P.C.; L. H. Gwynne, Bishop, D.C.G." 

What is this but the appeal to Christ in 
Whose Kingdom the right of brother to fight 
brother is not recognised, to the Master- Work- 
man of the carpenter's craft. Himself a religi- 
ous? Though we have forgotten it, Jumieges 
enshrined the spirit of those words. They 
would, if lived out, build again the guild and 
the community-house in what would be again 
"England's fair and pleasant land," and they 
would set up Truth and Beauty as pillars in 
a veritable House of God wherein brethren 
would dwell together in unity. 



XXIY 

THE WAACS 

IT may seem on the surface sheer impudence 
for one of the three officially black-balled 
classes, ' ' Officers, Natives, and ForeigTiers, ' ' 
to sit down and write on the Waacs. Since all 
save official conversation is forbidden, it is 
plain that the writer should only have looked 
on from afar, however grateful that from the 
height of Pisgah he has seen the Promised 
Land. In more sober English, despite my dis- 
abilities, I must write of the Waacs, for, stand- 
ing by in France and watching them, I see the 
fulfilment of a hope. 

Like most others of my sex, I was reared to 
regard women as inexplicable creatures. Those 
modern text-books of human science, our stand- 
ard novels, told me so, and I also was fain 
to believe the sight of my eyes. True, in the 
beginning a woman looked ordinary enough, 
for I distinctly remember seeing a baby in her 
bath and finding, as a boy, honest friendship 
with a girl. But the caterpillar changes to the 
butterfly, and not less remarkable was the 
change in a woman. One day one could run 

247 



^48 STANDING BY 

races and climb trees with her; she appeared 
to be possessed of legs and arms and a useful 
body; she could be addressed freely and took a 
remarkably intelligent interest in birds '-nesting 
and cricket; but the next all this was changed. 
Outwardly it was changed when one paid a long 
farewell to the vision of her knees and calves 
which, up to that point, had not been peculiarly 
interesting. Inwardly she changed too, or, as I 
am now inclined to think, was changed. She 
despised our dear delights. She would no 
longer share the hollow oak and seriously 
munch chocolate deposited a week ago in a tin 
box beneath the crumbling, sweet-scented stuff 
within, against just such a menace as an In- 
dian invasion. The companions she now de- 
sired must have aged ten years in a day. She 
took an hour to dress. . . . 

At the time I, at least, was as ignorant of 
physiology and sex as I am to-day of Cherokee, 
or nearly so. Indeed, I was never illuminated 
by that lovely mystery; I merely became en- 
lightened. By that time it had become clear 
that there were two worlds, and that she be- 
longed to one, I to another. We might watch 
each other; we might occasionally call across 
the abyss ; but that was all. It was, indeed, rec- 
ognised that we should meet in time, but that 
meeting was held to lie to such an extent upon 
the knees of the inscrutable but all-wise gods 
that little was said about it. 



THE WAACS 249 

This conclusion nnderran, surely, the whole 
tide of our affairs. Certain occupations, games, 
industries, and ambitions were outside woman's 
sphere, and certain others were outside man's. 
This was no natural adjustment of affairs, but 
an artificial. We did not say that a woman 
must not vote because she could not, but be- 
cause in our opinion — an entirely arbitrary one 
— it was better for her and for us that she 
should not. We did not say that a woman could 
not be a navvy, but that she ought to dam socks. 
It having been proved that a woman was cap- 
able of taking an Honours degree at Cambridge, 
we said that at least she ought not to proceed 
to that degree. And we did not base all this 
on the Holy Scriptures, or the teachings of the 
Catholic Church, — the only two authorities in 
life, — but we based it upon our sense of what 
was fitting. In other words, we based it upon 
a convention. Like most other conventions, the 
Kaiser blew with his mouth, and it was no more 
found. Probably it is his greatest achievement. 

So was made possible what I saw the other 
day. It was wet and muddy under foot, and I 
was returning from the outskirts of a big base 
city. As I plodded along the semi-country road, 
sliding back half a foot for every one I took 
forward, I saw three figures approaching me. 
They wore breeches, what appeared to be aimy 
tunics, heavy boots, and puttees coated nearly 
to the knee in mud. Each carried a varied para- 



250 STANDING BY 

phernalia of equipment slung about its person. 
Each walked indifferent to appearances, or 
the condition of the road, with that steady per- 
sistence which is characteristic of our troops. 
All three smoked cigarettes, and they were 
plainly comrades. But when I got a little nearer 
I saw that the hair of the central figure was half 
an inch too long for a modern man, and that 
the figure was different. The central one was 
a Waac. And it seemed to me that twenty years 
slipped off, and that I looked at the companion 
of my boyhood. 

Not that the Waacs usually wear breeches, 
or at least that — am I sufficient for these things^ 
— the Waac breeches are not usually visible. 
But their legs are. The Waacs are as graceful 
as men used to be, what time women, except in 
the Church, were as beasts of the field or as 
surias of the harem. As I look at their uni- 
form I always think that in it women have not 
merely equalled but beaten us. It is neat, work- 
manlike, and beautiful. The Highland costume 
for men and the Waac for women — perhaps 
these are the best the West can do. One prays 
that women may never adopt (visible) breeches, 
and never garrotte themselves in starched linen 
collars. I honestly believe that as a sex they 
will not do so, for I have almost limitless faith 
in women these days. 

But a truce to this : let us come to the creature 
within the shell: what of the soul of the Waac? 



THE WAACS 251 

Everybody knows wliat the Waacs and tlieir 
sisters of this birth of a new age have done. 
From nurses to farm-labourers they have 
shouldered the conventions away and estab- 
lished, God grant for ever, that what a woman 
can do that she shall do. What she can do is 
not, of course, self-evident yet. Everyone who 
stopped to think for five seconds knew that she 
could vote, for of all the easy and inane occupa- 
tions that is the easiest and inanest. I own that 
I have always been sorry that she wanted to 
vote at all, but I have persuaded myself that it 
was but a symbol, and that having got it, she 
would round on us all and say : This absurdity 
of voting has got to stop. She can do so, thank 
God, she and only she, for the Almighty in His 
mercy has given her a respectable majority. 
For the rest, I do not see what she cannot do, 
unless it be true — as I have heard a Waac officer 
in high place affirm — she cannot rule on the 
whole as well as man, which means, I take it, 
that as yet the sex cannot produce the same 
proportion of navigators of the troubled cur- 
rents of this world as men can produce. In 
this, as in all else, we must be pragmatists. If 
experience shows that she cannot do it, then, 
and then only, let her leave it alone. Thus 
only may we seek peace and ensue it. 

But what of her soul? How has this strange 
and complex thing been affected by the change ? 
That is what I have asked myself a hundred 



26« STANDING BY 

times, watching the swing of her skirts from 
the club window as she goes down the street, 
watching her about with the favoured Tommy 
who alone of us may speak to his sisters in this 
strange land, watching her driving colonels 
through the traffic as she leans back at the 
wheel with an easy, careless mastery, or watch- 
ing her idle — no, ''stand by" — in lofty disdain 
outside H.Q. or a dock hangar. For the body 
betrays the soul of us daily. Certainly it be- 
trays the soul in the sense that the things we 
would not, those we do, but it betrays it also 
in the gestures that betoken character, the 
laugh, and the glance of the eyes. And although 
their grandmothers would probably not have 
believed it possible, the girls one sees in France 
betray their soul daily, and what one sees makes 
one very glad. 

Motherhood — sex — that is, of course, the su- 
preme question. All this new work for women, 
this new outlook, it has been said, will make her 
sexless, and if that were to be so, the doom 
would be on us and our kings. But, God bless 
them, one does not notice that among the Waacs 
in France. It is not necessary, I take it, to do 
more than deny the rumours one has heard of 
a low tone of morality among them, for there 
is no evidence whatever that France has lowered 
them in the least; but it may be necessary to 
recount with gratitude how often one has seen 
the Waao and the Tommy go out in pairs. 



THE WAACS 263 

When the day's work for both is done, they 
forgather, and her arm slips as easily as ever 
into his as they stroll out together. They have 
both learned, as London even could not teach 
them, that there is a false prudery about these 
things, and not so unlike the French, the Waac 
and the Tommy must be seeing life to-day with- 
out blushing. Now I come to think of it, how- 
ever, it was nearly always the girl who blushed 
in the old days, and perhaps the discipline of 
her new life in France has helped the girl 
over that. 

For unquestionably the attitude of the one 
to the other is not quite the same as it was 
before. A thousand little things reveal that. 
When the rare occasion presents itself and one 
does get a chance talk with a Waac, the notice- 
able thing is that the girl is so enormously more 
independent. One feels that wooing has gone 
out of fashion, or at least wooing on the old 
lines. Perhaps we are waiting for the Colonel 
in some deserted orderly-room by the fire at 
night; I take out my cigarette case and as a 
matter of course offer it to her. As a matter 
of course she takes it. She crosses her legs, and 
the short skirts just suffice to cover her knees, 
and we chat of England and the world. She 
shall certainly go to the Colonies after the war, 
she says, blowing out the smoke. Yes, very like- 
ly motor-driving, except that there are two 
friends of hers on the land, who are thinking 



254s STANDING BY 

of a Canadian farm, and of course one would 
have a Ford and she might fit in there. I sug- 
gest that we have a walk one afternoon. Cer- 
tainly, she agrees, unperturbed; we can meet 
well out of the town. . . . The Colonel comes 
in and we stand chatting a few minutes more. 
"Well, if you are ready. Miss Smith," he says. 
. . . She cranks up; she knows her car, she 
says, and I should only muddle it. And I lean 
back in my seat and remember the companion- 
ship of past days again. 

One feels, then, that when sex does come in, 
it comes in differently. Toromy's girl in the 
old time was one who had an immense admira- 
tion for his unknown and glorious life, who 
thought of him as she washed up the dishes, and 
who embarked on the adventure of love as on 
an entrancing but bewildering voyage. The 
Waac is altogether different. Tommy and she 
do the same things, at the Base at least, and 
far from thinking of him as she washed up, 
she has been watching him across the office or 
the depot half the day. And as to sex, thank 
God these girls have opened eyes. They surely 
must have, in France. 

I suppose there are some who will dislike 
these things, but I doubt if a philosopher can. 
The scales were so unfairly weighted in the 
old days. The lives of man and maid, lived so 
far apart, were united recklessly in that they 
often deliberately faced the entering in of 



THE WAACS 255 

knowledge when it would be too late to sepa- 
rate should that knowledge bring disaster. We 
obviate that to-day. Marriage is bound to be 
much more of a deliberate bargain. Each knows 
well enough what the other has to bring to it, 
and each knows too what must be given up. 
Nature is very strong, but your modern man 
and your modem girl can afford to face her 
serenely. She surely must quake a little in her 
shoes. She must see that her despotism is all 
but over. Man has been fairly definitely her 
master for some time, but she was always more 
or less secure so long as woman was her slave. 
The Waac and her kind are likely to be mistress 
now. 

Frankly it seems to me that we may expect 
all kinds of things to result. There will be, for 
one thing, divorce legislation, until it is possible 
for the parties deliberately to determine that 
marriage shall be with them an arrangement 
terminable if a failure ; and there will be fewer 
children. There will also be, I think, a dictinct 
class of women, all but a third sex, who will 
not marry, but who will prefer equal companion- 
ship with men and the business of the world 
rather than the business of the home. There 
were, formerly, always women who preferred 
the business of religion to the business of the 
home, and when Protestantism largely shut that 
door to them they were lost. The nation had an 
extraordinary number of all but useless citi- 



^56 STANDING BY 

zens among such. These now, their numbers 
increased, will turn to affairs hitherto outside 
them, and will doubtless do admirably there. 
And let us frankly face that we of the Church 
are here up against a dilemma. If, on the one 
hand, we believe that motherhood is the su- 
preme object for a woman, then we have to 
face it that Nature has made a mistake in the 
proportion of the sexes, or that we ought to 
be polygamists. If, on the other hand, we be- 
lieve that parentage is a holy thing dependent 
rightly on a perfect union, involving a new re- 
lationship as inviolable as that created by birth 
between mother and child, brother and sister, 
then we must always have women, as we have 
men, for whom marriage is shut out, and who 
had best play a straightforward, unhampered 
part in the affairs of citizenship. 

One thing I believe our new women will do : 
they will purify us. A woman, with her latent 
knowledge of motherhood, is less prone than 
men are to that damnable suggestion that man 
is so much of an animal that his animal passion 
must be gratified. Not all, truly, but mo,et 
women, realise the soul as men do not, and sure- 
ly because they are the more concerned in giv- 
ing it birth. There may be with them times in 
which sexual relationship is purely animal pas- 
sion, but they reflect more 'speedily, and they 
remember longer. They have also an instinct 
of sex-protection ; they resent more fiercely the 



THE WAACS 257 

betrayal of the sex. It will be good for us 
when they shape our laws. 

In the long run, thtii, we shall benefit by the 
change. We shall be less conventional and less 
prudish, and there is hardly anything to be 
more desired. The Christian Church mil as- 
sume its rightful place as a free society freely 
entered of men and women who, recognising 
revelation, willingly and gladly submit to its di- 
vine laws, and if necessary — as in an unsuccess- 
ful marriage — suffer pain to keep them. Unless 
the Church again convert Society, Society itself 
will be freed from the artificial acceptance of a 
yoke it does not understand and does not wish, 
and will make its own laws and mind its own 
business. An individual will choose between 
them, and if, as is likely, it becomes a contempt- 
ible thing to choose the Church, that will be 
so much the better for the Church. The Church 
will be lass likely to forget her Master and His 
words. Society, on the other hand, will have 
her owTi battle to fight, and we shall see with 
what success she can control the sexual as the 
other natural laws. Probably there will be 
much the same result. We daily bind the winds 
and tame the lightning, but we still lose an oc- 
casional Titanic. The disasters of the old age 
were not as great, but they were more. A pretty 
choice is before us, but I at least am glad to 
see the experiment. 

I suppose ultimately I am glad because I do 



g58 STANDING BY 

finally believe both in Nature and the Churoli, 
though I hate to see either artificially ham- 
pered. It struck me how much I believed in 
them the other day when I had another en- 
counter with the Waacs. I was on my bicycle, 
in the outskirts of a pretty little seaport, and I 
passed a company of Waacs as they passed a 
camp of Tommies. Two of their officers led 
the girls, spruce and smart, who had no eyes 
for me or anyone. They were so extraordi- 
narily self-conscious, but for all that so capable, 
that one was awed more than amused. The 
swing of the skirts seemed a sacrament of eman- 
cipation. Behind them marched the girls in 
fours, for the most part all eyes for the camp. 
Tommies waved to them and, with a surrepti- 
tious glance ahead first, they waved to the Tom- 
mies. One even dared to edge left, and as a 
man moved forward, I caught the interchange : 
"To-night at six as usual." 

Coming home, I punctured below a great 
wood, and was — a little profanely, I confess — 
attending to affairs, when I heard a voice be- 
hind me, "Suppose I held the wheel, wouldn't 
that be easier?' ' I looked up and saw the Waao 
officers, hugely amused. It was easier, and 
presently, while the patch dried, we sat on the 
bank and discoursed of many things. The 
prettier had a great bunch of violets which she 
shared with me, and I learned that the girls 
were in the woods. For half an hour we lay on 



THE WAACS 259 

the grass and looked at life together, and I felt 
proud as an Englishman of those healthy, keen, 
clean-limbed women who were comrades with- 
out being foolish, and yet still feminine. 

"Heigh-ho," said the senior; ''it's time we 
went," and she pulled out a whistle. I was off 
down the road as she blew it. 

A few minutes later, I slowed down and 
rested without dismounting against the parapet 
of a little bridge over a crystal clear streamlet, 
to listen. The Waacs were trooping out of the 
woods, and singing as they came. The voices 
rang very true and we could hear the words 
perfectly : 

"Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away — 
In Jesu's keeping we are safe, and tbey ..." 

"Fine girls they are," said a Tommy to me 
respectfully, but I thought a trifle hoarsely; 
"brings back the old village, it do, to hear them 
'ere." 

It did; and I maintain firmly, "we are safe, 
and they." 



XXV 

PEACE TERMS 

I'VE come to say good-bye," said I. 
''Oh, have you?" said Jim. '*Back to 
the cushy Base ? Lucky beggar ! And yet 
I don't know if you are really lucky. I think 
I should go stark mad at the Base. Perhaps" 
(he went on meditatively) "that is just what 
they are doing. ' ' 

''Who?" I queried, trying to sit down on the 
folding camp-stool and springing up in alarm. 

''Look here, Bobbie," he exclaimed. "It is 
bad enough having the Hun trying to smash 
things up from outside, without having you at 
the same game within. Sit on the bed, you fat 
brute; that'll bear you." 

I thought it might. It was home-made out 
of what looked like sleepers. So I sat down in 
silence, with a studied effort of contempt. The 
effort seemed to fail. Jimmy tossed his pouch 
over, smiling. 

"Who?" I queried again, lighting my pipe. 
For answer he kicked out at the thing that lay 
on the floor. "When I read that thing," he 
said, "I am always utterly dumbfounded. It 

260 



PEACE TERMS 261 

is really a most remarkable e:^erieiice. The 
E.A.M.C. pass me as fit for the line; only the 
other day the Tripos people gave me a first, 
and the 'Varsity a prize for Political Science, 
and yet I must be insane, Bobbie. It's either 
I or apparently the rest of the world." 

*'It's you," I said calmly, but warily. 

Then followed what they call in books a 
dramatic interlude, which ended in our getting 
up panting but merry. This war tends to make 
one feel damnably old; it is very good to find 
one is not. 

We sat down again, and I looked at him as I 
struck another match. This is a very, very 
strange world. It was the same old Jim that 
I saw; the dug-out might easily enough have 
been his room at Jesus for all the difference it 
had made to him, and yet in that moment a 
wave of emotion came over me. I did not un- 
derstand it then; I do now. But it sobered 
me, and I felt I could not fool any more. ' ' Well, 
well, Jimmy," I said. ''What's all this about 
the world being mad?" 

He jumped up excitedly. *'It's these peace 
terms," he said, ''Lloyd George's and Wood- 
row Wilson's. Do you think they are sincere? 
And yet they must be ; I believe they are. Ajid 
in that case — oh! Good Lord!" 

"Explain," said I. 

He sat down again, and stretched out his 
legs in the old way. "Very well, Bobbie," he 



262 STANDING BY 

said, ''let's go quietly over it all. There is no 
reason why we shouldn't. You correct me if 
I'm wrong. 

"In the first place, these people say they wish 
a peace dictated by principles, and not by cir- 
cumstances or the advantages of victory. That 
in itself is very laudable. The old treaties, 
they say, were not based on principles ; Vienna, 
for instance, was a patch-up to suit the dynas- 
ties. But the peace that is to settle this busi- 
nes, is to be based on — what is the phrase? — 
'elementary and universal principles of justice 
among nations.' This will make it a lasting 
peace. Ha\'ing looked for perpetual motion in 
what was held to be a stable world, we now 
look for perpetual stability in what we know 
to be a world of flux. However, pass that over. 
Otherwise I'm right, am I not?" 

"Yes," said I. 

"Well, Bobbie," said he, "I don't like the 
sound of it from the start. You can pull the 
phrase to bits in two minutes. It presupposes, 
to begin with, that nationality is elementary 
and universal. It's not; it's a stage in devel- 
opment. Nations are constantly being torn 
and constantly changing, and the tendency is 
for them to disappear. Of all political units 
they are the most difficult to define. I speak 
generally, but in a moment, when we come to 
apply their principles practically, we shall get 
sufficient modern illustration of that fact. But 



PEACE TERMS 263 

what is a nation, anyway? No one knows. I 
looked up the word in a decent dictionary the 
other day and read, 'the inhabitants of a par- 
ticular country.' But what's a country? A 
country is nothing — so many square miles, 
that's all. It's determined by the people who 
live in it — which takes you round the vicious 
circle. Natural boundaries used to help, but 
they all but don't exist to-day, and won't in a 
hundred years or less. Why should they? 
Are we sheep to care about pens?" 

''Here, steady on," I said. 

"But, my dear man," said he, ''I'm right. 
It's the simplest lesson of history. Think it 
out for yourself: I'm not going to lecture on 
it. Still, India's a country, but has it a na- 
tionality! The American is a nationality, but 
the U.S.A. is no country; it's lines ruled on the 
map. Is Great Britain a country? The other 
day it was three, the day before a dozen. Have 
we a nationality? I should say that to-day 
there is a very definite British nationality, but 
when in the world did it begin? The thing 
doesn't admit of such terms as elementary and 
universal. Go back far enough and we are all 
of one blood. Divisions came in somehow and 
somewhere, and the tendency is for them to 
disappear. To-day your sense of their impor- 
tance is determined by whether you are stand- 
ing on top looking down, or underneath look- 
ing up. It also depends upon the spirit you 



264 STANDING BY 

are of, and your education and your religion 
and your circumstances, and quite often on 
your stomach. No, if I had to make a peace, 
I'd prefer to work on dynasties rather than on 
nations." 

''But there are no dynasties, now," I said, 
"or at least they don't count, and we don't 
want them to count." 

"No," he went on, "I know that, and so we 
come to nations. Now I don't so much mind 
working on a basis of nationality — in fact, the 
harder the job the more interesting it is, but 
don't kid yourself with talk about elementary 
principles. Principles, perhaps, but not ele- 
mentary or universal ones. There aren't such 
things, or if there are, either we don't know 
them, or they belong to religion." 

He stopped to light a cigarette. I said noth- 
ing, and the cigarette once going, he blew out 
the match with a first mouthful of smoke. 
"Poor old Pope!" he said. 

"Good Lord," I exclaimed, "what has he to 
do with itr' 

"Oh, can't you see? "We used to blackguard 
him for bringing religious principles into poli- 
tics. Now the Kaiser and Lloyd George do the 
same thing, and we blackguard the Pope for not 
doing so any longer — although he does in his 
own way. ' ' 

"Well, leave the Pope alone," said I, "and 
get on. What about principles'?" 



PEACE TERMS 265 

''Principles?" he queried. "They're hor- 
ribly dangerous to start with. Facts, dynas- 
ties, victories, bayonets at your tummy — all 
those things you can deal with, and ultimately 
laugh over, but principles are elusive things. 
Also they are things over which people feel 
more strongly than anything else. Only one 
thing is perfectly plain : if you are going to deal 
in principles, you must be absolutely honest, 
and as far as possible impartial, and you must 
carry them right through at all costs." 

''And in this case?" 

"Well, first, so far as I can see, it means the 
end of the British Empire, and indeed of all 
Empires. Possibly that is a good thing: I am 
not personally sure, but possibly it is. But, 
secondly, with the passing of Empires, must 
pass an age. That, again, is no new and possibly 
no bad thing. Ages have passed before — in 
fact, none has endured. But they have usually 
passed blunderingly, with some horrible smash- 
up, followed by bloody experiments for a cen- 
tury or two. Surely we ought to avoid that. 
But can we? Do we know what we want? 
Have we any real idea how to get it?" 

"But why the British Empire?" 

"Well, the principle No. 1 of the Peace 
Terms is that every nationality can decide its 
political future. Very good. Poland can elect 
to be neither German nor Eussian, but Polish. 
So can Finland. Both are conquered peoples 



266 STANDING BY 

of the old regime. But what if Courland elects 
to be Prussian? What about the Orange Free 
State, Egypt, India? What about Morocco, 
Tunis, the Philippines? How can you refuse to 
the one what you grant to the other? It's no 
use saying India can't govern itself: I don't 
suppose it can ; neither can Eussia nor the Bal- 
kans nor Ireland. Nor is Great Britain capable 
of governing itself in my opinion. But what 
is my opinion? What is anyone's opinion? 
Who or what is the Lord of the world to decide 
when a nation comes of age? Grant that a 
right of self-government of choice exists, and 
where are you going to stop? You might per- 
haps set up a board of Nations to which each 
people can at all times appeal for independence, 
but, however doubtful that experiment, one 
thing is certain: Empires pass. And I don't 
see any guarantee against injustice, chicanery, 
double-dealing, when I think of that Board. 
Given our enormous modem political units, spe- 
cialists must run the Board, and specialists are 
rarely fair. 

'' However, that is the principle. Upon the 
strength of it, Central African tribes are to vote 
for their master. Anything more futile than 
that, I cannot imagine. Look at the Masai, in 
train-oil and skins coming in to vote ! Nothing 
appears to me more unutterably stupid and de- 
ceitful. The natives will, of course, vote for 
ns: our rule has always been easier, and more- 



PEACE TERMS 267 

over we shall be on the spot with promises. 
Also we are victors, and the native always 
greases the strong man. But has anything 
whatever been gained when they have voted? 
Do you honestly feel a principle has been 
saved? Would you let them vote for anyone 
else or for independence, and for how long are 
they to be bound by an entirely prejudiced ac- 
tion which they made in the time of their sav- 
agery? 

'^But go on. If the Masai can vote for Eng- 
lish Government, why not the Zulu and the 
Basuto? Are they to be forced to remain in 
or to enter the Union of South Africa? Or 
what if the Zulu preferred to vote to be Ameri- 
can? The thing is possible. They might pre- 
fer to be under the U.S.A., than under the U. 
of S.A. 

"Or if a people may vote for their master, 
why should they not vote to be their own mas- 
ter? Why should not the people of Bombay 
vote for independence, and have a guaranteed 
neutrality, and be judged by the Hague Con- 
ference when there is friction with the rest of 
India? They are just as capable of independ- 
ence as the Albanians. 

' ' Then take principle No . 2 : No annexa- 
tions. Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 
1870, so she is to give it back. Good : who an- 
nexed Tunis? Or why stop at 1870? Who an- 
nexed the West Indies, the Cape, Mauritius? 



268 STANDING BY 

Possibly the late owners don't want those lands 
back, but would Spain care to have Gibraltar? 
. . . No ; if we mean these principles, Empire is 
at an end. It does not matter whether it was 
a good Empire or a bad Empire, but Empire 
means government, and the day a father says 
to his son : ' Now, my boy, you are of age ; you 
can do as you please,' paternal advice may con- 
tinue, and paternal affection, and family un- 
ion, but paternal government has abdicated.'* 

''I think I agree with you," I said; **but 
what then?" 

''Well, old son," he went on, "that means 
that we are deliberately ending an age and be- 
ginning another. It is to be an age among the 
peoples of the world of admitted right, an age 
of give and take, an age of the surrender of our 
own desires and interests at the bidding of a 
majority vote, an age of curiously mixed social- 
ism and individualism, for all are to combine 
to say that each shall be free — a golden age, in 
fact." 

''You hope for it, then?" said I. 

"Hope for it?" he all but shouted, jumping 
up. "Why, good heavens, it has been the 
dream of the world from immemorial time. It 
is the dream of every Utopia, if I may say so, 
of every Christ that has ever lived among men, 
and of none so much as the dream of Jesxjs. 
But it is an uncharted sea, and you cannot save 



PEACE TERMS 269 

it without a guiding principle. And there you 
are, back to principles again!" 

''Well," said I, ''they all talk of them." 

' ' No, ' ' said he ; " not of this sort. They talk 
of principles which are to settle the past, but I 
see no talk of principles which are to rule the 
future. A principle may make Poland free and 
(shall we say) Gibraltar Spanish, but what 
principle is going to content us all under those 
conditions ? It seems to me that it will have to 
be a principle strong enough to rule out na- 
tional pride and the colour bar; a principle 
strong enough to defeat greed and love of 
power ; a principle that belongs to the Kingdom 
of God, and not to the kingdoms of men. And, 
Bobbie, honestly, is there a nation on earth im- 
pregnated with the principle of divine charity 
enough for that?" 

I did not answer him. Outside the guns of 
a battery near woke up as we sat, and talking 
became impossible. Presently a bugle blew. 
Jimmy shot his left arm out in that original 
gesture invented by this war, and said, in a 
lull: "Mess in a minute or two. Can you 
come ? ' * 

I shook my head, and knocked my pipe out 
against my boot. We got up together, and 
stepped out into the trench. A subaltern was 
passing. ' ' All quiet 1 ' ' inquired Jimmy humor- 
ously, for the infernal guns were at it again. 



270 STANDING BY 

And the subaltern nodded. Then we clasped 
hands, and he went right and I left. 

It was just about three months later that I 
went to the hospital to see him, and as I stood 
there, looking down, there was a terrible ache 
at the heart. Could they not even spare 
Jimmy, the gay, wise, lovable Jimmy, who had 
never done a man wrong in his life? He lay 
pitifully white on the bed, breathing so lightly, 
his black hair, that I could have touched even 
as if I had been a woman, all hidden in the long 
swathes of the bandages. "He is quite uncon- 
scious, and won't live through the day," said 
the V.A.D. who had brought me in. I clenched 
my fist against emotion. My rebel heart reeled 
with the clash of thought — this damnable war, 
those hell-hounds, whose lust for power, or 
blundering, or stupidity, have caused it! 
Jimmy! — and yet we were but friends, and 
mother has parted from son like this, girl from 
lover, unnumbered times. ... I could have 
turned a bayonet in the stomach of a German 
easily with joy. . . . 

And then as I looked, I began to remember. 
. . . The new age. . . . The new principle. 
... If we did not begin with it, and begin one- 
self, what likelihood was there of continuing? 
It seemed to me that if I left him so, I might 
be helping to lay again the train that will go on 
murdering such as Jimmy down the centuries 



PEACE TERMS 271 

to come, as it has down centuries past. And 
then I saw what hung above his head, and the 
girl by me caught the glance and whispered: 
"He would have it there." It was Jimmy's 
principle, and it is God's. In that moment I 
think I knew that he was right; that no glory 
of the past can match what may be the glory 
of the future if that be set up. And I knelt by 
the bed and surrendered my friend for the sake 
of the Crucified. 



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